Multi-touch coming to Ubuntu in Maverick Meerkat

A while ago, Dell briefly advertised Ubuntu, a major break from the constant drone of Microsoft and its Windows marketing messages that are typically broadcast by any large computer maker. Turns out that that brief blip on the screen may have been a sign of something bigger to come.

Canonical, the company behind the open source Linux-based operating system Ubuntu, has announced the release of uTouch 1.0, Ubuntu’s multi-touch and gesture stack. Former CEO Mark Shuttleworth's blog, too, announced, “You’ll need 4-finger touch or better to get the most out of it, and we’re currently targeting the Dell XT2 as a development environment so the lucky folks with that machine will get the best results today.”

With Ubuntu 10.10, which carries the name “Maverick Meerkat” and is in line to succeed the current 10.04 Lucid Lynx, users and developers will have an end-to-end touch-screen framework — from the kernel all the way through to applications. “Our multi-touch team has worked closely with the Linux kernel and X.org communities to improve drivers, add support for missing features, and participate in the touch advances being made in open source world. To complete the stack, we’ve created an open source gesture recognition engine and defined a gesture API that provides a means for applications to obtain and use gesture events from the uTouch gesture engine,” the official Canonical blog read.

Work on multi-touch began in Ubuntu 10.04 LTS to get additional touch hardware supported in the Linux kernel, particularly the Dell XT2, HP tx2 tablets and the Lenovo T410s laptops. “Though our work at the application level has only just started, we are certain that multi-touch and gestures will be central to the way we use Linux applications in future,” the post reads. Canonical is also working with manufacturers of touch-enabled products and those of their underlying technology in order to bring innovations in user experience to a broader audience, the aim being to bring the natural, tactile experience of the world to the desktop, window manager, and applications Touch will be part of the Ubuntu Netbook, Desktop and Light products from 10.10 and beyond. Mark Shuttleworth certainly would like to see “touch-aware versions of all the major apps” as he calls it – browser, email, file management, chat, photo management and media playback, for the 11.04 release.

“In Maverick, quite a few Gtk applications will support gesture-based scrolling. We’ll enhance Evince to show some of the richer interactions that developers might want to add to their apps,” said Shuttleworth on his blog. “Window management will be gesture-enabled in Unity, so 10.10 Netbook Edition users with touch screens or multi-touch pads will have sophisticated window management at their fingertips.” He urged users to install Unity on their desktop “for a taste of it” by just keying in “apt-get install ubuntu-netbook” and choosing the appropriate session at login.