Saturday, April 16, 2011

Xorg + Wacom Tablet - configuring dual monitor with tablet working on only one

I must admit: I love my dual display setting, a 2880x900 virtual display composed of 2 19" monitors alamost as much I love sketching with my tablet. If you have seen any recent posts at pincel quebrado (broken brush) you can see how much I've been toying around with my tablets and Gimp and Krita.

But dual display and tablet configurations always had one huge problem: the x-server only uses half of the height of the tablet so it can set the right width. It is a pain to use only half of the tablet so for many years I've disabled dual head and lately created a user for only this purpose that I'd start in another x-session.

Digging through the piles of senseless info available in the web I finally found the solution to the problem, which now seems stupidly obvious: xsetwacom

For setting dual display on my desktop I use:


xrandr --output DVI-0 --right-of VGA-0


Which puts my DVI monitor at the right of my VGA monitor. Then use xset wacom to restrict my tablet to my DVI, right, monitor:


xsetwacom set "Wacom Intuos2 9x12 stylus" "MapToOutput" DVI-0
xsetwacom set "Wacom Intuos2 9x12 eraser" "MapToOutput" DVI-0
xsetwacom set "Wacom Intuos2 9x12 cursor" "MapToOutput" DVI-0