I have a Synaptics Touchpad on my Dell XPS 14z and I was wondering if there was any way I could enable some gestures besides two-finger scrolling.
Are there any special drivers i need? I've read somewhere that 12.04 has had some issues with multitouch gestures but I'm not exactly sure. If there is a way, could someone give me instructions on how to enable (or get) these features?
I found some evidence that touchegg may not work with 12.04
Touchegg is designed to bring multi-touch (touchpad) functionality to Linux based operating systems. In layman’s term, it is an open source multi-touch gesture recognizer for GNU/Linux which is backed by C++, Qt and uTouch-geis library. With TouchEgg, you can define what type of actions are to be initiated for a specific multi-touch gesture. Numerous actions can be assigned for multi-touch gestures such as maximizing or minimizing windows, resizing applications, switching to desktop view, etc. It requires uTouch and evedev libraries.
Touchegg comes with some pre-enabled gestures, however gestures can be enabled by editing the config file. It allows three-fingers pinch, two, three, four and five finger tap and two to four finger swipes.
add this ppa,ppa:utouch-team/daily as,
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:utouch-team/daily
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install touchegg
check here
config file location ~/.config/touchegg/touchegg.conf
The config file can be edited in the following way:
open config file.
gedit ~/.config/touchegg/touchegg.conf
get list of actions here
# THREE FINGERS DRAG
[THREE_FINGERS_DRAG_UP]
action=MAXIMIZE_RESTORE_WINDOW
settings=
[THREE_FINGERS_DRAG_DOWN]
action=MINIMIZE_WINDOW
settings=
Similarly, in the example below, the four finger drag gesture is configured to switch to the desktop display.
[FOUR_FINGERS_DRAG_DOWN]
action=SHOW_DESKTOP
settings=
With Touchegg, users can easily define multi-touch gestures in order to get the Mac like multi-touch experience on their Linux systems.
you can watch a brief demonstration video. here and here
I found also this one
though I haven't tried it.
Not as of 07 17, 2012. Ubuntu recommends using touchegg, which is has an API incompatibility with the latest version of utouch in Ubuntu according to this ticket. Ubuntu's Unity has some multi-touch features involving 2+ fingers, but they are not configurable without modifying source code and recompiling*. If you are interested in recompiling Unity, and know C++, here is the relevant source.
Here is the Ubuntu wiki for Unity's multitouch features.
