Add multi-touch to your Linux notebook… and your old MacBook

scaledtrackpadwords

Here’s a fascinating hack for a rainy day. Programmer randomtruth has figured out a way to enable multi-touch under Linux and is working on a way to add multi-touch to older MacBooks. He has created a driver with:

-Pinch Gesture

-4 finger gestures

-3 finger gestures

It needs a 11cm Synaptics touchpad and a Linux-based distro and works under Gnome right now.

All of this works right now but he’s also adding multitouch to other notebooks – including old MacBooks:

Techcrunch event

Join 10k+ tech and VC leaders for growth and connections at Disrupt 2025

Netflix, Box, a16z, ElevenLabs, Wayve, Hugging Face, Elad Gil, Vinod Khosla — just some of the 250+ heavy hitters leading 200+ sessions designed to deliver the insights that fuel startup growth and sharpen your edge. Don’t miss the 20th anniversary of TechCrunch, and a chance to learn from the top voices in tech. Grab your ticket before doors open to save up to $444.

Join 10k+ tech and VC leaders for growth and connections at Disrupt 2025

Netflix, Box, a16z, ElevenLabs, Wayve, Hugging Face, Elad Gil, Vinod Khosla — just some of the 250+ heavy hitters leading 200+ sessions designed to deliver the insights that fuel startup growth and sharpen your edge. Don’t miss a chance to learn from the top voices in tech. Grab your ticket before doors open to save up to $444.

San Francisco | October 27-29, 2025

A new project I am also working on another program it is open source, and will come out for MacOSX before the multi-touch driver. Ill reveal more info about it on a later date. So grab the rss feed so you will be alerted about the progress of these projects.

Resident Linux hacker Scott is trying it right now and we’ll report back on our findings.

Topics

, , , ,
Loading the next article
Error loading the next article