Racing To Finish X.Org Multi-Touch Support

Peter Hutterer has provided an update on the state of X.Org multi-touch support as he hopes to have this input feature ready for integration into the next X.Org Server release.

Multi-touch has been a work in progress for a while after being delayed from the X.Org Server 1.11 release and is not part of X Input 2.1, but multi-touch as a feature of X Input 2.2 will hopefully be ready for X.Org Server 1.12. The original X.Org multi-touch implementation goes back to 2010 and even at that stage had undergone several revisions.

X.Org Server 1.12 is anticipated for release in February or March of 2012 while the merge window on this next major update is coming in just a few weeks.

Peter Hutterer, the X Input expert responsible for Multi-Pointer X and many other features, has blogged a short update on multi-touch. Here's the key points from his new posting:

- Peter is still aiming to land Xi2.2 for the xorg-server 1.12 release. "For the last couple of weeks I've been pretty much working full-time on getting multitouch/XI 2.2 ready for the merge...I'm still rather optimistic to get this into 1.12, though it's getting a bit unwieldly."

- Where the code is at now: "Right now, it looks like touch event delivery is working, including nested grabs.Chase Douglas started on the pointer emulation while I was away and we're now at the point where emulation works, except that pointer grabs on top of multitouch clients aren't handled yet."

That's it for now. Another pleasant feature for X.Org Server 1.12 is smooth scrolling support. But if you're an Ubuntu Linux user, Ubuntu 12.04 LTS is not expected to ship with xorg-server 1.12 but rather the latest xorg-server 1.11 release with various back-ports.