Fedora 17 Will Feature Multi-Touch Excitement

The Fedora Engineering Steering Committee has approved the multi-touch feature for Fedora 17.

At today's FESCo meeting, the committee approved multi-touch support as a feature of Fedora 17 (meeting minutes). The feature specification on the Fedora Wiki details having the latest Linux kernel, evdev input driver, X Server, X Input 2.2, and Xlib to take advantage of the brand new Linux multi-touch capabilities.

However, this feature doesn't involve multi-touch-ifying any of the common Fedora desktop applications or making any other changes, but just about getting the underlying components out to Fedora users. "This is a plumbing layer feature only and will not directly be visible until applications or toolkits make use of the feature."

Approving this feature shouldn't really come as a surprise seeing as X Input 2.2 with multi-touch is part of X.Org Server 1.12, which will be released in March and be found in Fedora 17 anyhow. The multi-touch support and other X Input improvements are also largely the work of Peter Hutterer, a Red Hat developer.

This feature comes to Fedora after it's already been found in Ubuntu, but not as part of the mainline X.Org Server code-base -- instead as a hacked-together solution on a patched X.Org Server until Ubuntu 12.10 when X.Org Server 1.12/1.13 will be integrated.

Fedora 17 is codenamed the Beefy Miracle and here's some of the features of this next Red Hat sponsored Linux distribution that should be releasing in May.