Latest libinput on ubuntu

Question

Coming mostly from Fedora and Archlinux I used to have the latest libinput available in a reasonable time. Currently, on ubuntu 18.04 I do not see how can I have the latest libinput e.g. 1.12 at the time of writing on my machine. Is there a ppa or has anyone tried to install it from source without messing up the whole system?

I do not mind to compile it but I am not well educated in testing it and making sure it is working in conjunction with other packages properly. Having ThinkPad TrackPoint I kinda feel having the latest libinput is crucial!

Answer 1

Hopefully, someday someone will make a PPA with latest libinput. Until then, here are instructions on building such package yourself.

It's easy, instructions are mainly taken from here. I assume you don't need to generate docs, so I don't install dependencies for them and disable them in meson call. It's also important for --prefix to be usr in meson-configuration line, so libraries are installed to standard locations.

Step1: install build depenendencies

$ sudo apt install -y git ninja-build python3-pip
$ sudo apt build-dep libinput
$ sudo pip3 install meson

Note: although Meson is in Ubuntu repo, however in the snippet it is installed with pip. The reason is: due to Ubuntu mostly providing ancient software there's a possibility their Meson version will be too old to be able to build libinput. ATM Ubuntu 18.04 is known to have this problem, but I assume with time it may happen to other releases as well.

Step2: clone and build libinput

$ git clone https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/libinput/libinput
$ cd libinput
$ meson --prefix=/usr -Ddocumentation=false build/
$ ninja -C build/

Step3: create libinput package and install

Though easiest way of installing built libinput is by running ninja -C build install, but I strongly discourage that unless you know what you're doing (you will get untracked files all over your system that may get overwritten on system update, and depending on situation may even break libinput completely).

Instead, use this script I've written to assemble a package.

$ wget https://gist.githubusercontent.com/Hi-Angel/45030ab89a2378b42511612cbe48d247/raw/package-deb-libinput.sh
[…]
$ bash ./package-deb-libinput.sh  build/
[…]
dpkg-deb: building package 'libinput-git' in 'libinput_1.15.3-212-g60edbd2d.deb'.

You can see the name of the new package in the script output, so all that is left is to install it (note: the ./ part in the path is needed for apt to correctly interpret argument as a local file):

$ sudo apt install -y ./build/libinput_1.15.3-212-g60edbd2d.deb

To make use of installed libinput you need to restart graphics session (for example, reboot).

---

Reverting to older libinput

May you wish to get back the distro-provided libinput, just install libinput10 package (it will replace libinput-git):

$ apt install -y libinput10

Appendix

In case something happens to github gist, here's the current content of the script:

#!/bin/bash
set -e
if [ "$#" -ne 1 ]; then
    echo "Wrong number of parameters.
Usage: $(basename $0) build_dir"
    exit 1
fi
MESON_BUILD_ROOT=$(readlink -f $1)
PACKAGE_VERSION=$(grep -Po 'LIBINPUT_GIT_VERSION.*"\K.+(?=")' "$MESON_BUILD_ROOT"/libinput-git-version.h)
PKG_DIR="$MESON_BUILD_ROOT"/deb
mkdir -p $PKG_DIR/DEBIAN/
cat > $PKG_DIR/DEBIAN/control <<- END_OF_TEXT
PACKAGE: libinput-git
Version: $PACKAGE_VERSION
Architecture: amd64
Maintainer: Mystique Packager
Description: input device management and event handling library
Depends: libevdev2, libmtdev1, libudev1, libwacom2
Conflicts: libinput10, libinput-bin, libinput-dev, libinput-tools
Provides:  libinput10, libinput-bin, libinput-dev, libinput-tools
Homepage: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/libinput/libinput
END_OF_TEXT
cd "$MESON_BUILD_ROOT"
DESTDIR=$PKG_DIR ninja install
fakeroot dpkg-deb --build $PKG_DIR/ libinput_$PACKAGE_VERSION.deb