MyPaint And The Ancient Wacom

Yeah, weird topic. However, I discovered MyPaint purely by chance earlier today. It looks like a neat Painter-style application geared towards people with a preference for Free and Open Source software. It runs on Windows and Linux, and there’s a nice .deb ready for Ubuntu from GetDeb so installation was a breeze.

I dug out my ancient Wacom tablet (not my tablet pictured, mine is a lot more dirty and worn, and I lost the silly mouse thing years ago) which I’ve had for almost a decade (it turns ten this summer) and got a little curious as to how painless it would be to get it running under Ubuntu. Turns out it was completely painless – plug it into an available USB-port and presto, everything works just as expected. Especially important was the pressure-sensitivity, and when I gave it a quick go in MyPaint it worked just fine.

So, maybe soon I’ll be doing some virtual painting again? Was a long time since last I did this, might be fun!