Multitouch
Contents
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-Toolkits") 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
Multitouch in Maverick - Mailing list announcement
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.
Basic resources
Multitouch/Testing/CheckingMTDevice - How to find your device ID and test it for multi-touch capability
Multitouch/Testing/UsingGesturetest - Using the gesturetest tool to see if you're getting expected uTouch events
Multitouch/Testing/EvtestCapture - A useful tool for assisting X/driver/grail hackers in the debugging of touch and/or hardware issues
Multitouch/Testing/UsingMtview - A visual feedback tool that shows touch points, sizes, disconnects, offsets, etc.
Multitouch/Calibration/Ntrig - A tool for calibrating N-Trig hardware.
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
Additional resources
Multitouch/PyMT - Testing multi-touch with Python MT
Pairing and multi-touch demo using PyMT
Development
The uTouch framework and related projects are open source. If you would like to contribute, you need to do the following:
sign Canonical's contributor agreement
read and adhere to our Developer's Guide to the Galaxy
- abide by the coding styles and best practices of the related upstream projects
- start hacking!
Reference Materials
Multitouch/Definitions - A glossary of terms we use when discussing uTouch technology, both at the user-experience and engineering levels
Blueprints and Specs
Areas of Interest
Multitouch/Dev/HCI - Human-Computer Interaction: it's not just touch! What does the future look like? What would we like to see?
Multitouch/Dev/Gestures - Continued work on defining gestures for uTouch
Hardware Support
- 3M Touch Systems - 3M™ Display M2256PW
- Dell Studio 17 with touch (N-Trig)
- Dell Latitude XT2 tablet laptop - featuring N-Trig support (see below)
Check the Ubuntu Multitouch FAQ for configuration details
- Lenovo T410s with touch (N-Trig)
Multitouch/LenovoIssues - exploration of the difficulties with the Lenovo
- tested, works with PyMT demos (needs sudo, configuration)
Apple Magic TrackPad
Multitouch in Natty Narwhal (Ubuntu 11.04)
Multitouch in Maverick Meerkat (Ubuntu 10.10)
- Software that supports Multitouch in Ubuntu
PyMT in Ubuntu - information about the PyMT project and how to set Python MT in Ubuntu to see simple multi-touch applications and demos. PyMT doesn't use the uTouch stack, though there has been talk of integrating support for the GEIS API.
Specs & Blueprints
Multitouch in other Ubuntu versions
Lucid Lynx (Ubuntu 10.04 LTS)
Project Wiki for Lucid Lynx efforts
Specs & Blueprints
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.
Related links
Launchpad
- Tangentially Related: