Wed 9 Jun 2010
Multitouch working in Fedora
Posted by J5 under Fedora , Freedesktop , Gnome , multitouch , xwindows[4] Comments
Thanks to Carlos Garnacho’s recent work with the evdev driver and Gtk+ along with Peter Hutterer’s work on getting the multitouch situation sorted out inside of X, not to mention everybody else who has contributed to the effort, I was able to get Multitouch working on my Fedora 13 powered Lenovo T410s.
All the following instructions relate to those who have N-Trig multitouch devices. Mileage may vary with other devices. To start playing around with multitouch in Fedora today you will need
- my evdev multitouch RPM packages built from Carlos’ branch
- Warning: this package obsolete xorg-x11-drv-evdev so you will no longer get updates from the Fedora repo
- Note: I’ll provide a yum repo for my packages once Koji is up and running again, for now if you don’t have an X86_64 machine you will need to rebuild the source rpm.
- If you have a N-Trig device you will also need to get the kernel Kyle built which has a fixed N-Trig driver (hopefully this will show up in an update soon).
- You will also need Carlos’ xorg.conf snippet. This is again for the
N-Trig driver but should be easily modifiable for other devices - To play with multitouch you will need the latest Gtk+ from the xi2-playground branch
I recommend building Gtk in a jhbuild environment or at least don’t install it since it is the unstable 3.0 branch. Once the multitouch stuff has been backported to 2-20 branch I will start providing packages. I take no responsibility for the breakage of anyone’s machine due to replacing such a major system package. Thankfully, if you run inside of jhbuild you can play around all you want without fear of breaking your system. Another option might be to run inside an virtual machine but I am not sure if multitouch events will propagate correctly yet.
If you want to play with some demos you will find them inside the tests/multitouch directory of Gtk. Have fun and ping me with any issues you have. It might be nice if we got this working for Fedora 14. The pieces are certainly falling into place.
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June 9th, 2010 at 4:31 pm
Awesome!
It’s time for the GnomePad
June 10th, 2010 at 12:52 am
Cool stuff
One aclaration about GTK+ branches, as discussed in the GTK+ meeting [1]:
- GTK+ 2.20 is the current stable branch. Only bugfixes are allowed.
- GTK+ 2.22 is the last 2.x release, and only new accessors and bug fixes are allowed. No new features
- GTK+ 3 (master) is the target branch for new features and active development)
[1] http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gtk-devel-list/2010-March/msg00134.html
June 10th, 2010 at 3:08 am
very excited to know that someone has got multitouch working finally in fedora. btw, what kind of hardware interfaces are suppored at the moment? I am using NextWindow MT on one machine, and a Candos Multitouch panel on my laptop. Is it going to run out of the box? getting the update, gotta check it myself
cheers to devs
June 10th, 2010 at 11:19 am
@garnacho, didn’t want to imply the 2-20 branch was unstable, only that my packages could be
@touchaddict – It would be great to see if your hardware works. Fedora supports a multitude of touch devices out of the box since Fedora 12 but we don’t have the support for multitouch out of the box just yet. However if your devices have proper kernel drivers, X should be able to be configured to at least propagate the events with my evdev-multitouch rpms.