Hello! I thought I’d ask here if anyone already experimented with this. I have an Huion Pen Display so I thought what if I’d take a Raspberry 5 and mount it on the backside of the tablet. That would give me a bit more portable setup that I could more easily move with me around the house, it would also free up my laptop for other things.
Now the real question is I would use Linux on the Raspberry and I see we have a Pencil 2D version for Linux so that is cool. I also see that Huion have Linux drivers for the Pen Display so I hope it would work just as good as it does with Windows.
Sincce Raspberry 5 is now more powerful than the older models would there be any concernes that Pencil2D would be too sluggish to use?
I would guess that Pencil2D would run fine on a Raspberry Pi 5, but the only way to know if it works well enough for you is to try it. It will also depend to some extend on the project (canvas size, number of layers, etc.).
You should be aware that we only have official Pencil2D AppImages for the x86 and x86-64 CPU architectures, they will not run on the Pi which uses an aarch64/arm64 architecture. Most likely the package manager for whatever distro you install will have have a Pencil2D package, and most likely it will be an outdated version which I do not recommend using (this is currently the case with Raspberry Pi OS). You can try the flatpak version, but I do not know how well that supports other architectures. There is a good chance you will have to build Pencil2D from source if you want the latest and greatest. If you have some familiarity with the command line, it should be fairly simple to follow our build instructions: Building Pencil2D on Linux | Pencil2D Developer Documentation
As far as compatibility is concerned, it should work out of the box with your tablet. Linux tablet support is generally better than on Windows, albeit with less features. There have been a couple reports of scaling issues running Pencil2D on display tablets, but there are likely workaround if you encounter that.
Feel free to ask questions and let us know how it works out for you.
Yes, so I was a bit worried of Pi being ARM but I think as you suggested building Pencil2D from source is the best option for me then, because I need the latest and greatest :) (Btw. thank you developers, P2D 0.7.0 is awesome)
The documentation you linked to, on how tou build on Linux will be needed when I get there. I’ll do some trial and error and ask here if I fail.
I’ll post here as my DIY PI-Tablet computer advances, got myself a 3D printer too so I could make my own thing with the tablet integration if I’m inspired enough. Don’t hold your breath though, first I need to finish my animation that has been going on for almost a year now ( a 5 months pause during the summer) so I will definitely need to get that done first.
