Touching the X11

There was no easy way to make use of touch- input devices on Linux with Qt. Up until now. On a recent meeting with other people interested in getting touch (and here we are also talking about touch with multiple points) in Linux/X11 during the X.org Developer Summit and Ubuntu Developer Summit (great events!), it has been decided to fill this gap. The new X11 protocol for delivering touch data was made as an evolution of the XInput protocol - XInput 2.1 and the experimental server-side implementation is on its way. Here in Qt we have decided to give it a try and recently I've added a branch of Qt implementing parts of the specification.

You cannot talk about touch and not show videos :p

Right now it is still work-in-progress - both the spec is not final, and the server-side implementation has much to do (like grabs support and fixing well-known bugs). The Qt patch implements only basic support for XI2.1 events -- like no modality and popups support and implements a weird case - XI2.1 events on top of core pointer events. However for those who like living on the bleeding edge here are the links:

• Qt branch with experimental XInput 2.1 support:
  http://qt.gitorious.org/+qt-developers/qt/multipoint-touch branch 4.7-with-xinput2.1
• X.org with experimental patches: binaries for Ubuntu and sources

All devices implementing kernel MT-protocol should be working (here is a list from Ubuntu project).

Feel free to provide feedback both here for the Qt part of the implementation and on the ubuntu multi-touch dev mailing list