Multitouch

Revision 46 as of 2010-08-26 11:10:55

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About

This resource features information about multi-touch support for Ubuntu, including:

  • drivers for a range of hardware
  • a gesture processing system which does the heavy lifting of gesture analysis
  • APIs for developers who want to build gestures into their apps
  • support for gesture-based window management in Unity.

The uTouch gesture framework includes several different components:

  • libutouch-geis - ("Gesture Engine Interface and Support") which provides a consistent platform independent interface for any system-wide input gesture recognition mechanism for toolkits and applications

  • libutouch-grail - ("Gesture Recognition And Instantiation Library") which handles the raw data processing and provides higher-level gesture abstractions for developers to consume * gesturetest - which helps show the streams of events and data, useful for debugging and planning

We're also exploring gesture support in legacy applications with the assistance of this project:

  • ginn - ("Gesture Injector: No-GEIS, No-GTK") a deamon with jinn-like wish-granting capabilities: it gives applications the ability to support a subset of multi-touch gestures without having to integrate uTouch-GEIS or multi-touch GTK libs

See the "Community help" and Ubuntu 10.10 specific information below for help on getting started with multitouch in Ubuntu.

You can also subscribe to the Ubuntu Multitouch dev mailing list

News and Social Media

If you want to contribute / find the latest bookmarked and popular Ubuntu multi-touch information , please use the following tags: utouch multi-touch ubuntu demo

Here are some feeds with such tags:

Additional Background

  • Multitouch/Definitions - A glossary of terms we use when discussing uTouch technology, both at the user-experience and engineering levels

  • Multitouch - Wikipedia entry

Community Help

Testing

The utouch metapackage will pull in everything you need. It will be installed by default on UNE ("apt-get install ubuntu-netbook" for the full experience on your desktop, or "apt-get install utouch" for the touch-related pieces only). It should be available shortly. If you only want to experiment with multitouch, see "Multitouch in Maverick" depending on your device, below.

Test tracker

We have a test tracker to gather testing results from the community: http://multitouch.qa.ubuntu.com

If you want to participate in our testing efforts, please, check the testing instructions. Take into account that we also need people with non-MT input hardware to test for possible regressions.

Testcases

Development

The uTouch framework and related projects are open source. If you would like to contribute, you need to do the following:

Hardware Support

Multitouch in Natty Narwhal (Ubuntu 11.04)

Multitouch in Maverick Meerkat (Ubuntu 10.10)

Multitouch in other Ubuntu versions

Lucid Lynx (Ubuntu 10.04 LTS)

Jaunty Jackalope (Ubuntu 9.04)

Device information

N-trig

N-trig devices get their name from the providers of DuoSenseTM technology, combining pen, capacitive touch and multi-touch in a single device. N-trig’s DuoSense dual-mode digitizer uses both pen and zero-pressure capacitive touch in a single device.

The Dell Latitude XT2, HP tx2 tablets and the Lenovo T410s feature such multitouch support. Note, however, that a Linux firmware updater has not been released by N-trig for these devices. Before installing Ubuntu on your machine, be sure that you have the latest firmware. This may require using the Windows .exe firmware updater from the OEM. Note that the HP updater often requires 2 to 4 successive reboots of Windows in order to properly update.

Launchpad