Drawing illustrations with a Samsung S-Pen on Android

To draw illustrations, I am using a Samsung Note 10.1 table with digitizer pen, the S-Pen. Drawing by hand is very easy with the Samsung S Note app.

The main part is to get the tablet screen streamed to the computer. I am using the open source tool scrcpy for that. Here is the setup in detail:

On the Android phone:

• Tap 7x on the build number in the system information to enable the developer options menu
  • Enable USB debugging in the developer options menu
• Plug the tablet into the computer via USB cable
• Tap on the USB connection information in the status bar
• Change USB connection mode to MTP data transfer
• Allow USB connection from the connected PC

On the Linux side (Ubuntu 20.04 LTS):

• Install scrcpy
  • snap install scrcpy
• Run scrcpy from the cmd line:
  • scrcpy
• Now open Samsung Notes, Infinite Painter or a similar app to draw illustrations…

Linux Trouble shooting:

• Samsung driver support is a mess:
  • To see if your PC recognizes the tablet try:
    • adb devices
    • lsusb
  • If you do not see the device listed, try to use a USB2 port instead of a USB3 port.