Huion 420 driver setup

COMPUTER LINUX PRODUCT REVIEW

I bought the Huion 420 because I wanted to experiment with graphics tablet and drawing on linux. I chose this primarily because of its cost. Out of the box, the device worked on my archlinux setup, however it behaved more like a mouse, with pressure sensitivity not detected. I did some research and this is how I fixed this.

I first had to install the digimend drivers. To do that:

sudo pacman -S linux-headers
yay -S digimend-kernel-drivers-dkms-git

I had to unload previous versions of the drivers using modprobe.

sudo modprobe -r hid-kye hid-uclogic hid-polostar hid-viewsonic

The default settings were not to my liking and I found out there exists a tool that configures wacom tablets that can work with other models. It is a hit or miss whether this tool will work with your tablet, but in my case, it worked perfectly. To install the tool:

sudo pacman -S xf86-input-wacom

And then set up this file in xorg i.e. in my case, I created the file /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/52-tablet.conf.

Section "InputClass"
    Identifier "Huion on wacom"
    MatchProduct "HUION"
    MatchDevicePath "/dev/input/event*"
    Driver "wacom"
EndSection

To check if this worked, I restarted the laptop and ran:

xsetwacom --list

Seeing the contents below confirmed that the configuration had worked:

HUION 420 Pad pad                       id: 21  type: PAD
HUION 420 Pen stylus                    id: 22  type: STYLUS

To edit the pressure of the tool, I used gimp. For this go to Edit>Input Devices, select the HUION 420 Pen stylus and set mode to Screen. The pressure was then be detected in gimp.

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