Linux Xorg 7.5 to bring native muti-touch support to Linux

[Dark Star]

Xorg developers will be releasing multi touch featrue with Xorg 7.5/Xserver 1.7.. All the new upcoming distro like Ubuntu 9.10 , Mandriva 2010.0 , Fedora 12 and openSUSE 11.2 will be featuring multi touch feature out of the box..

Mohamed-Ikbel Boulabiar has written in to report that he and his team at the Interactive Computing Lab in ENAC, Toulouse have been successful in bringing native multi-touch support to Linux. While there is Multi-Pointer X in the mainlinue X.Org server (to be released with X.Org 7.5 / X Server 1.7), there is now multi-touch support to be able to handle gestures and other actions.

This multi-touch support requires the Linux 2.6.30 kernel. How this works right now is by reading the input events, translating them into multi-touch events using simple gesture recognition, and then sending D-Bus messages over to Compiz to produce multi-touch effects. Right now the code is deemed just a proof of concept, but they are currently working on a better implementation. More information on their current Linux multi-touch work is available through the project web-site. Below is a video they had recorded yesterday showing off some of their multi-touch work on Linux.

[youtube]DTeUbx_nnM4[/youtube]​

Source : http://www.lii-enac.fr/en/projects/shareit/linux.html

 

[vishalrao]

Good news again. Nice video! I have a feeling it will be years before this stuff is stable and has driver support for the various display devices... like when Compiz effects (wobbly windows) was demo-ed in a video in 2005 but it was 2007 until I got it working with Ubuntu 7.04 hah.

What worries me is that Microsoft invested millions in a company called N-Trig which makes multitouch devices and some of these are already in mainstream products like Dell/HP I believe...

And you can bet they will influence the company secretly and/or illegally to keep its hardware specs under wraps and tightly "licensed" to make life difficult for Linux support... I just hope there are other more open companies which make good devices that gain popularity/support on Linux...

 

[cool_cat]

Good Stuff.

 

[vishalrao]

Lets see if companies like MS, Apple start with the patent threats on this one...MS is an investor in Apple, did you know? And I believe it is this team mainly blocking other companies (Google Android) and open source from releasing my favourite multi-touch gestures like pinch-zoom etc... they must be cross-licensing their patents so they're good.

edit: this blog post says "dont hold your breath", the mutitouch thing might take months to be ready, then who knows how much longer before devices will work with it http://who-t.blogspot.com/2009/06/linux-multitouch-getting-somewhere.html

 

[unni]

Good news. I can weight till I buy my multitouch capable lappy.