15

I'd like to use some of the Unity multitouch features. I know my touchpad supports 2 finger gestures since it scrolls when I 2 finger drag on the touchpad.

How can I test to see if my touchpad supports three and four finger gestures? All the hardware documentation just mentions that the touchpad is multitouch and doesn't specify how many fingers it support. It's a Thinkpad X120e and this is what dmesg says:

[   14.821482] Synaptics Touchpad, model: 1, fw: 7.5, id: 0x1e0b1, caps: 0xd000b3/0x340000/0xa0400
[   14.821498] serio: Synaptics pass-through port at isa0060/serio4/input0
[   14.864676] input: SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad as /devices/platform/i8042/serio4/input/input7
Jorge Castro
  • 71,754
  • For a simpler and more accurate solution - try this http://askubuntu.com/questions/306412/how-can-i-setup-my-touchpad-multi-finger-tapping-functionality (see the answer) – mac Jul 29 '13 at 06:35

3 Answers3

19

As an update to htorque's answer, you must now use geis-tools instead of utouch-geis-tools (> 12.04). So run the following set of commands:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install geis-tools
geisview

In the new window, go under Device<device_id>Added:<device_name> (Probably the last option) and check device touches: <finger_number>. finger_number will tell you the number of multi-touch fingers your touchpad supports.

Sheharyar
  • 1,238
  • In 13.04, this solution doesnt work. For a easier and more accurate solution try this - http://askubuntu.com/questions/306412/how-can-i-setup-my-touchpad-multi-finger-tapping-functionality – mac Jul 29 '13 at 06:35
  • Works like a charm in 64-bits 14.04 – Vlad T. Apr 27 '14 at 17:13
7

You can install utouch-geis-tools and then run geistest, which shows you information about the device and gestures, e.g.:

Device 10 added
    attr "device name" = "SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad"
    attr "device id" = 10
    attr "direct touch" = false
    attr "independent touch" = false
    attr "device touches" = 4
    ....

where the last attribute is defined as the number of simultaneous touches the devices claims to be able to recognize.

However, uTouch doesn't seem to recognize more than two fingers on my system (ThinkPad T510), because geistest always shows

    ...
    attr "gesture name" = "Tap,touch=2"
    ...

when doing three or four finger taps, but I don't know if that's a hardware or software limitation (I just made this a bug report).

htorque
  • 64,798
4

Touchegg from http://code.google.com/p/touchegg/ lets you use multitouch gestures

If it works correctly (it doesn't on my end) it should let you test how many fingers you can use.

(by the way, if you just want to know if the touchpad supports multitouch, why don't you just check the specs?)

Chriskin
  • 3,242
  • touchegg looks nice but I accepted the other answer since the tool is already in the archive. Still +1, looks like a nice program! – Jorge Castro Apr 05 '11 at 12:40