Tuesday, July 6, 2010

Ubuntu Multi touch for any,all synaptics touchpad

Category: — SkyHi @ Tuesday, July 06, 2010

Multi touch for any,all synaptics touchpad

Multi-touch became trendy after iphone came up with it. We are seeing many new laptops with multi-touch. At hardware level, there is nothing special that you need, to make multi-touch work. You can also do two-finger scroll and two-finger tap to right/middle click. Also, three-finger tap, but, for me it is very hard to press three fingers at the same time(1 out of 10).

Create new file

gksudo gedit /etc/hal/fdi/policy/11-x11-synaptics.fdi
Paste the following code into the file and save it. 



  
      synaptics
      On
      90
      1
      1
      1
      3  
      2


Restart hal and enjoy multitouch touchpad. 
sudo /etc/init.d/hal restart

Update: Diagnosing your touchpad for multi-finger-sensing-capability

Few people have problem with this not working, while it works for few others. This is posted in ubuntu forums 
synclient -m 100
Fifth column in the output f is number of fingers on your touchpad. Put two or more fingers on your touchpad and watch the column. If you see it more than one, this should work for you.

REFERENCES
http://ubuntu-snippets.blogspot.com/2009/03/multi-touch-for-anyall-synaptics.html



I just upgraded my Ubuntu install to the latest release. I have a Synaptics trackpad that supports multitouch in Linux and I was trying to activate it. This is what I found:

http://ubuntu-snippets.blogspot.com/...synaptics.html

I tried what the site suggested, but I got the following error:
sudo: /etc/init.d/hal: command not found

Could someone tell me what's wrong/how to enable multitouch on my machine? I've made
it work in Windows 7, so I'm pretty sure it is supported.

Thanks!

hal doesn't exist any more in ubuntu 10.04. Try with these command:

xinput set-int-prop "SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad" "Two-Finger Scrolling" 8 1
xinput set-int-prop "SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad" "Synaptics Two-Finger Scrolling" 8 1 1
xinput set-int-prop "SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad" "Synaptics Two-Finger Pressure" 32 10
xinput set-int-prop "SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad" "Synaptics Two-Finger Width" 32 8

I have an acer 4820tg and it works.
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1479361