USB Pen Tablet not working on a Raspberry Pi

Question

I'm using a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B with headless Rasbian OS [terminal only] to connect to Parsec and technically use it as a "thin client" to Parsec by just running parsec command from the terminal.

Parsec is a server that allows low-latency streaming of desktop usually for games and graphic intensive application streaming.

USB Keyboard and USB mouse works just fine but attaching a USB Wacom Tablet, Raspbian fails to recognize it even as a mouse despite showing up in lsusb

Is there a way to use a USB Wacom Tablet on Raspbian? I already tried this https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=211665 but it did not work.

Answer 1

The first step would be to find out which driver is loaded for the device. This can be done by checking the kernel log (sudo dmesg) after plugging the device in, or by finding its bus/device number on USB (with lsusb) and checking

readlink /sys/bus/usb/devices/1-2/driver # bus number 1, device number 2

I would expect something like usbhid here. If there is no driver or a wrong driver gets loaded, there's usually something in dmesg log telling you what went wrong.

The next step will be to find out which libraries are used by your software (parsec) to talk to the device. For instance, Xorg appears to have a custom xserver-xorg-input-wacom package, as you found out. Perhaps parsec also has a package/library/plugin/whatever which provides the necessary support.