[19:54] <ppd> hi, anyone here? How do I check multitouch capabilities of my screen in ubuntu? I remember having multitouch to some extent but in Quantal and Raring there is nothing beyond more or less unusable two finger gestures
[20:05] <dandrader> ppd, you can try xinput test-xi2 <device>
[20:09] <ppd> dandrader, wow thanks! Max number of touches reports as 5 for the touchscreen. So I guess somehow multitouch should somehow work. At least for this resize handles thingie.
[20:10] <ppd> what am I supposed to be able to do in this window that openend up? draw something with my fingers? If so, then this doesn't work... :(
[20:10] <dandrader> yes, it should
[20:10] <dandrader> ppd, not, it's just there to capture events and print them on the terminal
[20:12] <ppd> dandrader, interestingly I get a list with "valuators" when I touch the screen with more than two fingers. However all are "0.00" except the first two
[20:18] <dandrader> ppd,  that's not a problem. the first two are probably x and y coordinates of the touch point
[20:18] <dandrader> and the rest are likely auxiliary information such as size of touch area, pressure
[20:19] <ppd> dandrader, I figured when I moved around a little on the screen :))
[20:19] <ppd> the question now is, where is the black hole that sucks the multitouch information
[20:20] <ppd> I once used a program called mtview in an older version on ubuntu to visualize the fingers recognized. Seems not in the repos unfortunately
[20:20] <dandrader> well, unity catches gestures with 3 and 4 touches. so applications will never see them
[20:20] <dandrader> applications will only receive 2-finger gestures
[20:22] <ppd> ah I see. Okay, that sounds sensible. I even found a list of supposed-to-work gestures in unity. However none of them work and I'm trying to find out why
[20:24] <ppd> btw. I really appreciate that you're trying to feed some info to a multitouch noob
[20:29] <dandrader> yw
[20:31] <ppd> dandrader, do you have an idea how to proceed? I assume the info on this page is correct:https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Multitouch So there should be quite some gestures available to me. However nothing works. So in my naive mind I assume the unity multitouch framework (grail?) doesn't receive the touch events/data. How would I start debugging that?
[20:34] <dandrader> hmm, that won't be so simple.
[20:34] <dandrader> one way is to run compiz manually from a terminal so that you can check grail output. like that:
[20:34] <dandrader> GRAIL_DEBUG=-1 compiz --replace ccp
[20:34] <dandrader> that from a virtual terminal
[20:35] <dandrader> but debugging compiz or xserver from your own machine is a pain
[20:35] <dandrader> it's more sane to do that via ssh
[20:36] <ppd> well that would be no problem
[20:36] <ppd> the thing is, I'm pretty much clueless, so I would need some serious guidance and such
[20:37] <dandrader> ok, good. another way would be to kill compiz (so that unity doesn't capture all 3 and 4 finger gestures) and run a simple grail or geis test application to check the gesture events
[20:37] <dandrader> geis tools ships a python app for that. it's called "geis view" if I'm not mistaken
[20:37] <ppd> ok. so I start a let's say lxde session or so and run the geisview program from there
[20:39] <dandrader> another thing is checking the output of xinput test-xi2 <device>. perform a multitouch gesture and see how many touch points are generated
[20:39] <dandrader> the "detail: 123" parameter tells the touch id
[20:39] <ppd> this should work from inside unity for more than 3 touches, correct?
[20:39] <dandrader> I think so
[20:40] <dandrader> so you should get a different stream of touch events  (different detail param) for each touch
[20:40] <ppd> detail seems to just increase by 1 for every time I start touching the screen
[20:41] <dandrader> let's say you move 3 fingers along the screen. you should get 3 new detail numbers
[20:41] <dandrader> because new 3 touch points were detected and reported
[20:43] <ppd> okay. one finger is detail: 0, if I touch with more I get details numbers >60 which do not really correspond to the amount of fingers I use
[20:43] <ppd> however the number increases with every "gesture"
[20:44] <ppd> I do receive events if I move up to 5 fingers on the screen, the sixth does not generate any events. So 5 finger support seems to be correct
[20:50] <ppd> interesting. The number always increases by two, no matter how many fingers I touch with
[20:50] <ppd> seems it recognizes only two at a time
[20:52] <dandrader> ok. gotta go. good luck with your debugging !