Re: touch events

[Chase Douglas <chase douglas canonical com>]

On 02/09/2012 12:06 AM, Jernej Simončič wrote:
> On Thu, 9 Feb 2012 08:31:42 +1000, Peter Hutterer wrote:
> 
>> note that depending on how recent your laptop is, it may support multitouch.
>> I've got a x220t and the touchpad in it works fine*.
> 
> From what I can see, multitouch is pretty much a driver feature. At least
> on Windows if you install a recent Synaptics driver, the laptop gains
> multitouch support (I verified this on several older laptops, eg. my own
> Acer TravelMate 4272WLMi bought in 2006).

Certainly you need a driver that supports multitouch, but it's not just
a driver issue. There are multiple versions of synaptics hardware
ranging from:

* single touch only
* multi-finger (one coordinate, but tells you number of fingers on pad)
* semi-multitouch (bounding box of two touches, you don't know which :)
* limited full multitouch (tells up to 3 locations, up to 5 touches in
  total, you don't know which touches you get locations for :)
* full multitouch up to 10 touches (I've heard of this latest gen, have
  yet to see one in person, I don't think there's any linux support yet)

You can imagine how much fun it has been to figure this all out...

-- Chase