enable multitouch support on older touchpads, as supported by driver v15.0.9.0

thanks for your report. reaffecting to the synaptics driver.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/550625?comments=all -- that bug has info on how to trace PS/2 activity via VirtualBox. Hopefully, it'll be enough to just do that trace with the "unlocking" driver.

This is not a duplicate! The parent bug is about touchpads that already had multi-finger capabilities in Windows; this bug is about using a hack to get multi-finger capabilities on ALL touchpads.

Just in case anyone thinks the driver is only doing emulation, try this in Windows: go to Mouse control panel, and press alt-shift-i.

One finger tip: 1 finger, pressure 60, width 4.
One finger sideways on the touchpad: it detects 1 finger, pressure 107, width 15.
Two finger tips side-by-side, slightly separated: 2 fingers, pressure 60, width 4. Same is true for 3 fingers.
Two fingers sideways: 2 fingers, pressure 150, width 4.

This is with that special driver.
I'll have to try it on my netbook, which came with multitouch out-of-the-box.

Ok, I got it wrong but this bug is still a duplicate.

This feature is already present in the current driver but due to different configuration on different touchpads we can't make it set by default. You will have to probe the best settings that suits you. See the new original bug for how to do that..

Hi there,

You will happy to know that an experimental version of the 'multitouch protocol' based dkms package is released here in bug #308191 which is providing true multitouch support for people who have touchpads with true multitouch capabilities(like in some latest synaptics touchpad). So if that works for you unsubscribe here and continue there instead..

Why does nobody believe that it could EVER be possible for a driver to patch the firmware?
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: that special driver IS NOT FREAKING EMULATION. IT IS REAL MULTI-FINGER!

And before you go saying it IS emulation, try what I described in the post above, in the debug window, on a real multi-finger touchpad. Then try it on a "non-multifinger" touchpad with an ordinary driver. Then try it with the special driver.

To be clear: this bug is not about getting multi-finger support on touchpads that already claim to support it, but were not working properly.
This bug is also not about using width-based emulation to get fake multi-finger detection.

This bug report is about sniffing out what, precisely, that magic Windows driver does to enable REAL multitouch on touchpads that NEVER claimed to support it. With that driver, I have real multi-finger detection. We need the Linux driver to do the same.

Sandeep, this bug was reported a while ago and there hasn't been any activity in it recently. We were wondering if this is still an issue? If so, could you please test for this with the latest development release of Ubuntu? ISO images are available from http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/daily-live/current/ .

If it remains an issue, could you please run the following command in the development release from a Terminal (Applications->Accessories->Terminal), as it will automatically gather and attach updated debug information to this report:

apport-collect -p xserver-xorg-input-synaptics REPLACE-WITH-BUG-NUMBER

Please note, given that the information from the prior release is already available, doing this on a release prior to the development one would not be helpful.

Thank you for your understanding.

Helpful bug reporting tips:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ReportingBugs

[Expired for xserver-xorg-input-synaptics (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]