New evdev Handles Multi-Touch, Smooth Scrolling

Following the release of X.Org Server 1.12 earlier in the week, the evdev input driver has been updated and released. The two big features for this common input X.Org driver is to take advantage of multi-touch and smooth scrolling, which is now supported by the latest X Input extension updates.

Peter Hutterer on Wednesday officially released xf86-input-evdev 2.7.0 as the latest evdev driver release. Smooth scrolling for X.Org came around this past summer and was then pushed into X Input 2.1, which then made it into X.Org Server 1.12 along with the further X Input 2.2 update. The Synaptics driver quickly took advantage of smooth scrolling and now there's the evdev support too in a released/stable version.

The other noteworthy item for xf86-input-evdev 2.7.0 is then, of course, multi-touch with X Input 2.2 when using supported multi-touch hardware. Using multi-touch with this generic input X.Org driver additionally requires mtdev. The mtdev library is the Multi-touch Protocol Translation Library, which translates the kernel input event stream into a simplified form that's more friendly for applications. The mtdev library can also handle finger tracking and some other capabilities.

The release announcement for xf86-input-evdev 2.7.0 with a list of changes since the earlier 2.6 release can be found on the X.Org mailing list.