Using ginn for adding multitouch gestures to ubuntu (for Acer 1825)

By Christopher, February 20, 2011

In my last post I explained were you found a tutorial for installing a real multitouch driver for the ACER 1825 and said I don’t know how to use these multitouch support. Thanks to Tom/drnessie who recommended ginn to me.

Ginn is a daemon which recognizes multitouch gestures with the ubuntu utouch interface and translates them to global or application specific shortcuts.

Installing ginn:

  1. download the newest ginn sources from this side: https://edge.launchpad.net/canonical-multitouch/ginn
  2. extract them into a arbitrary folder and change into
  3. install missing libraries sudo apt-get install libxml-dev libxml libbambf-dev
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./configure
#if more libraries are missing the configure scripts prints it out
make
sudo make install

Configuration:
Next you need to specify the mapping from gestures to shortcuts. An example is inside the source package etc/wishes.xml. This file needs to be located in /etc/ginn/wishes.xml. Copy this file and configure it on your own or check my configuration:
ginn-wishes.xml

Gestures:
I have added gestures for the webbrowsers opera,firefox and google-chrome, for Last.fm, gedit and xournal. More application are already defined.
In opera, firefox and chrome you could scroll in x and y direction with two finger dragging and zoom in/out with pinching.
In gedit/Texteditor you could scroll vertical with two finger dragging. In Last.fm application you could change volume with pinching and play next track with two finger right drag. In xournal you could scroll like in the browsers. I also specified the zoom/pinch gesture equal to the browser but on my system it does not work, I don’t know why, because its the same keyboard shortcut…? If somebody could help please write a comment.

Unfortunately our Acer 1825 is only a dual touch device and so you are a bit restricted with your gestures but you could use two finger dragging up,down,left,right, rotating left, rotating right and pinch spread and close.

Tipps for configuration:
I struggled a lot with the fact that the detection of the running applications is done with some strange matching of the name. The names seems to be language specific, therefore on my German ubuntu gedit is Texteditor. In my opinion the plain process name should be the better matching feature. If some gestures do not work on your system start ginn from terminal and do some gestures on your application and then look through the output from ginn how it named you application. This naming must be used inside the wishes.xml.

Start automatically ginn in tablet mode
This could be done by a simple edit on the gyro-key.run script from the last post:

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#!/bin/bash
pid=$( pgrep gyro-auto-rotat )
if [[ $1 == "activate" ]];then
#DO NOT START TWICE
if [ "$pid" == "" ] ;then
gyro-auto-rotate.run &
ginn &
fi
notify-send "gyro auto rotation enabled --> tablet mode"
else
if [[ $1 == "deactivate" ]];then
if [ "$pid" != "" ] ;then
kill -9 $pid
pkill ginn
#reset screen to default
gyro-auto-rotate.run normal
fi
notify-send "gyro auto rotation disabled --> laptop mode"
else
notify-send "No param"
fi
fi

Let me know about your cool gestures. It works really nice. Try it out.

13 Comments

  1. Tom / drnessie says:

    The only thing to add is that you can specify your own wishes.xml by using this command:

    ginn /etc/wishes.xml

    Other than that, nice guide.

    It seems awkward that I had to send the driver link to you, seeing as you were the one to give it to me in the first place, back on the Ubuntu Forums!

    • toffer says:

      Year you could specify the path to the wishes.xml (which could be stored wherever you want) but in my opinion its better to use the default paths which the developers choosed.

      “It seems awkward that I had to send the driver link to you, seeing as you were the one to give it to me in the first place, back on the Ubuntu Forums!”
      Its not really clear to me, what you mean by that. Did you mean, that I should have posted this guide (its more a summary) first on ubuntu forum? I do write these articles about the Acer 1825 on my blog to give compact place with information about that. I think its really difficult to go through this large block post for a beginner and grab all valid information. I think this is proofed by a lot of questions which are already answered some pages before.

  2. perpe says:

    Both of you are wrong, it was me who mentioned ginn and the enac drivers. But, it’s ok, because you have more linux and ubuntu experiences then me. I’m only good in searching and finding things, you have to work it out….I’m still a newbie and learning.

  3. mimi says:

    Cool stuff! Thanks for the tip and the nice write-up (and to whoever first mentionned it!).

  4. Arobase40 says:

    @ perpe,

    You’re also wrong, as I quoted enac drivers first, precisely on November 3rd, 2010 :

    http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1486671&page=8

    I didn’t mention Enac name, but who knows about Stephane Chatty knows he is related to Enac Organization… :p

    For the rest, ginn and the related were mentioned before the outcoming of Maverick as part of the multitouch project. 😀

  5. Arobase40 says:

    EDIT : About the date : November 3rd, 2010, it was of course related to the new hid-multitouch drivers.

    Regarding the first drivers from the Enac, they were first published by april 2010.

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