Hi,
I read that synaptic touchpads should support multitouch and as I have one of those I tried to enable it. However I wasn’t successful.
After some digging in config files (I had to enable SHMConfig) I ended up with KDE configuration tool which is really cool but all multitouch options are there disabled. And also there is an information which says that only one finger is detected by this touchpad.
Is something wrong or my touchpad just doesn’t support multitouch? I got this laptop 1.5 years ago so it’s not very old.
And by the way, I have this in my Xorg.0.log
28.821] (--) SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad: touchpad found
28.821] (II) config/udev: Adding input device SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad (/dev/input/mouse2)
28.821] (EE) No input driver/identifier specified (ignoring)
28.822] (II) config/udev: Adding input device PC Speaker (/dev/input/event8)
28.822] (EE) No input driver/identifier specified (ignoring)
It may be that the KDE4 developers have not yet got round to including the features and the disabling is an indication that they are to come rather than that there is a driver/hardware limitation. You could ask at Index page • KDE Community Forums
They are also disabled on my setup which appears to have the relevant drivers:
/lib/modules/2.6.34.7-0.5-default/kernel/drivers/input/mouse/synaptics_i2c.ko
/usr/include/xorg/synaptics-properties.h
/usr/include/xorg/synaptics.h
Thanks, I’ll try. And is there a way how to confirm that my touchpad supports multitouch? A lot of people recommend syncliet -m 100 but there is just a lot of numbers and I don’t know what should I look for. When I touch the touchpad with two or more fingers the x,y coordinates go crazy but that’s pretty much everything
Systemsettings - Touchpad. If it’s a true synaptic touchpad, you can set behaviour there. Otherwise you can use options in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-synaptics.conf
System settings - Touchpad… that’s what I meant when I talked about KDE configuration tool. But it wasn’t possible to enable multitouch here and this tool also recognized only one finger. The question is why, whether my touchpad just doesn’t support it or this hasn’t been implemented yet in KDE, as john_hudson said. I am going to ask in KDE Forum as well, maybe I find an answer there.
EDIT: Everything indicates that I have a real synaptics touchpad, it can be found for example in /proc/bus/input/devices or in mentioned configuration tool. Does the age of the touchpad matter? Or are there any touchpads which are only pretending that they are synaptics?
So I asked in KDE forum and I read something about this configuration tool. It seems that software is ok so the problem really must be either in some internal settings/drivers or in my touchpad which just doesn’t support more than one finger. All I found about this was that “most synaptics touchpad do support multitouch” but nothing more specific. I also found that on some laptops with Windows is necessary to install an unofficial driver to get it working. Is the situation in Linux similar or all Linux drivers for synaptics touchpads automatically support multitouch?
I have the same issue, and I didn’t have it in Kubuntu on the same laptop. (However, I had a worse problem, in that button presses weren’t recognized, and the only way I could right-click was by mapping it to a two-finger-tap). -GEF
So I asked in KDE forum and I read something about this configuration tool. It seems that software is ok so the problem really must be either in some internal settings/drivers or in my touchpad which just doesn’t support more than one finger. All I found about this was that “most synaptics touchpad do support multitouch” but nothing more specific. I also found that on some laptops with Windows is necessary to install an unofficial driver to get it working. Is the situation in Linux similar or all Linux drivers for synaptics touchpads automatically support multitouch?
I have the same issue, and I didn’t have it in Kubuntu on the same laptop. (However, I had a worse problem, in that button presses weren’t recognized, and the only way I could right-click was by mapping it to a two-finger-tap). -GEF
Have you tried installing the ‘synaptiks’ touchpad management tool for KDE? Maybe that will do the trick for you.
Hi Deano. Actually it was installed by default, and since adding repos packman, updates, and updated KDE apps, I’ve run update, so I should have the latest and greatest. No change in behavior. I have exactly the same scenario described by the OP. -GEF
FYI, KDE 4.7 cleared up this issue for me, for all practical purposes. I know my touchpad will recognize 3 fingers, but KDE now shows recognizing one finger with two-finger emultation by width detection. That’s perfectly fine for my purposes; now I get right-click with two-finger tap and scrolling vertical or horizontal with two-finger drag. -GEF
