Add multi-touch to your Linux notebook… and your old MacBook

Thursday, June 18th, 2009

Biggs is the editor of TechCrunch Gadgets. Biggs has written for the New York Times, InSync, USA Weekend, Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, Money and a number of other outlets on technology and wristwatches. He is the former editor-in-chief of Gizmodo.com and lives in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. You can Tweet him here and G+ him here. Email him directly at john@techcrunch.com. → Learn More

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Here’s a fascinating hack for a rainy day. Programmer randomtruth has figured out a way to enable multi-touch under Linux and is working on a way to add multi-touch to older MacBooks. He has created a driver with:

-Pinch Gesture

-4 finger gestures

-3 finger gestures

It needs a 11cm Synaptics touchpad and a Linux-based distro and works under Gnome right now.

All of this works right now but he’s also adding multitouch to other notebooks – including old MacBooks:

A new project I am also working on another program it is open source, and will come out for MacOSX before the multi-touch driver. Ill reveal more info about it on a later date. So grab the rss feed so you will be alerted about the progress of these projects.

Resident Linux hacker Scott is trying it right now and we’ll report back on our findings.

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