Wacom Bamboo Pen & Touch CTH-470 3+ finger gestures

[Sirolf10]

I've posted this before on Ask Ubuntu, but after one response which didn't solve it and some waiting, I decided to ask it here, too.

I love my CTH-470 and I'm glad it works without having to spend hours in the terminal (since I believe 12.10, which I'm running now*). But in the manual it states that you can swipe with three or even four fingers. However, I can't seem to find how to 'activate' this in Ubuntu. Is this even possible? If yes, how? And if no, are there any plans to support this in the future?

*I'm running Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal Quetzal 64bit, with Gnome 3.6.2

[Favux]

Hi Sirolf10,

Because you are using Gnome rather than Unity you do not have the default Unity multifinger system gestures. You'll probably need to install touchegg.

I've done some investigation of the use of a multifinger BambooPT in Ubuntu. It can get a bit complicated. See part X., the multifinger multitouch section, of the updated BambooPT HOW TO. Skim through that and maybe check out a few of the links. I haven't yet tried touchegg in the Gnome Desktop but since it works with KDE I think it should work in Gnome. Also see the Linux Wacom Project wiki's Multitouch page: http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawik...tle=Multitouch

[Sirolf10]

Hey Favux,

Thanks. There is a problem, however. I installed touchegg following http://task3.cc/1068/os-x-like-multi...-ubuntu-12-10/, but it's not working yet; running touchegg in the terminal returns

Reading config from  "/home/floris/.config/touchegg/touchegg.conf" Try to make a multitouch gesture. If everything goes well the information about the gesture must appear 
[+] Avaliable gesture: 
     Name ->  Flick 
[+] Avaliable gesture: 
     Name ->  Drag 
[+] Avaliable gesture: 
     Name ->  Pinch 
[+] Avaliable gesture: 
     Name ->  Rotate 
[+] Avaliable gesture: 
     Name ->  Tap 
[+] Avaliable gesture: 
     Name ->  Touch

But no matter what gesture I make, nothing happens.

I've tried running

xsetwacom set "Wacom Bamboo 16FG 4x5 Finger touch" Gesture off

which only caused my tablet to only translate my moving finger to the moving of my cursor, but no clicking could be done (except for the 4 buttons and my pen, they still worked fine).

Running

synclient TapButton2=0

as suggested at the Linuxmint-forum-thread resulted in the error

Couldn't find synaptics properties. No synaptics driver loaded?

The thread also states that you should run

sudo apt-get install build-essential libqt4-dev utouch libx11-6 libxtst-dev libgeis-dev libqt4-qt3support qt4-linguist-tools qt4-qmake libutouch-geis-dev

but that returns the following:

Reading package lists... DoneBuilding dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
Package libutouch-geis-dev is not available, but is referred to by another package.
This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or
is only available from another source
However the following packages replace it:
  libgeis-dev:i386 libgeis-dev


E: Unable to locate package utouch
E: Package 'libutouch-geis-dev' has no installation candidate

After some research I found that utouch has been deprecated (https://code.google.com/p/touchegg/issues/detail?id=169). Also, my tablet is not listed here https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Multitouch/HardwareSupport, at least not with 3+ fingers. Does this mean it won't work or should it be solvable?

[Favux]

OK, a bunch of stuff to work through.

First thing is I don't believe we have to worry about https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Multitouch/HardwareSupport. I verified the third generation BambooPTs work fine with the 3 and 4 finger Unity system gestures when the BambooPT has wacom driver gestures turned off and/or is on the synaptics driver. I'm thinking if the Unity gesture engine (with the utouch stack) is recognizing the BambooPTs multifingers then touchegg (with the utouch stack) will too.

Instruction-wise it is good to know utouch is deprecated in Quantal. The instructions from the OS-X tutorial are pretty straight foward. Did you try using the touchegg from the repository (Software Center) first?

I thought the default on the Wacom X driver was one finger tap was a left click even when gestures were turned off. But maybe that only applies to the tablet PCs with only 1 finger touch. Something to clarify.

But if turning off gestures disables 1FGT left click that's a problem. Unless touchegg.conf can handle single finger? Something like:

<touchégg>
    
    <settings>
        <property name="composed_gestures_time">0</property>
    </settings>
    

    <application name="All">

        <gesture type="TAP" fingers="1" direction="">
            <action type="MOUSE_CLICK">BUTTON=1</action>
        </gesture>
        
        <gesture type="TAP" fingers="2" direction="">
            <action type="MOUSE_CLICK">BUTTON=3</action>
        </gesture>
. . .

[Inoki]

Maybe a bit off-topic: @Favux you mentioned, that in KDE tablet config works as it should? I'm asking coz I'm running Xubuntu, but that doesn't have any tablet GUI configurator whatsoever and I'm not even sure will it have one in the near future. I also saw that KDE has better font management, which makes it the perfect multimedia desktop for artists.

I own a Wacom Bamboo Manga.

[Favux]

Hi Anathaen,

Just a bit.

But yeah, the KDE Wacom applet appears to work about as good as the Gnome applet. Actually I should put that the other way around because the Gnome applet is the late comer. The KDE dev.s are active, one was just getting something cleared up on linuxwacom-discuss the other day. They are switching it over to using libwacom I think, instead of their own tablet data base. Plus I think there was a bug with the one installed by default in KDE Precise which rendered it non-working. So you might have to install a more recent version. But from what I can tell the dev.s respond to questions pretty well and are helpful.

[Sirolf10]

Nope, I hadn't, since I had read (can't remember where at the moment, probably at an issue of the touchegg-project) it didn't work. I just tried and it indeed didn't work. It installed v1.0 instead of v1.1.1 and running it now returns

Reading config from  "/home/floris/.config/touchegg/touchegg.conf" Segmentation fault (core dumped)

So I sudo apt-get remove'd it and re-sudo make install'ed it. Should I try something with the synaptics-driver?

[Favux]

OK, I'm assuming you have a working touchegg again.

You could try synaptics but first let's check what version of xf86-input-wacom you are using. What is the output of the following command in a terminal?

xsetwacom -V

[Sirolf10]

Okay! Yes, it's in the same state as before trying the repository-version. xsetwacom -V returns 0.17.0.

[Favux]

Alright, xf86-input-wacom-0.17.0 is the Quantal default version and is likely the problem. The xsetwacom Gesture parameter has been present quite a while. The new behavior with Gesture off is that the touches get passed to the X Server. That starts with 0.18.0. That's what touchegg needs. So you need to update to at least 0.18.0. I would follow part II. of the BambooPT HOW TO I linked you to earlier and install the recently released xf86-input-wacom-0.20.0. Or if you prefer clone the git repository. By the way Ubuntu calls it the xserver-xorg-input-wacom package.