I understand my MSI x350 notebook comes with a Sentelic trackpad, which supports multi-touch (according to the MSI website). Is there a way to enable multitouch on Ubuntu? I've been having difficulty finding info about this on google, and since it's not a synaptics touchpad I haven't been able to find much info in ubuntu docs. My mouse preferences doesn't have a trackpad tab like it does on, say, a Macbook.
Running "xinput list" returns:
FSPPS/2 Sentelic FingerSensingPad id=11
And in my Xorg.0.log:
[ 17.481] (II) config/udev: Adding input device FSPPS/2 Sentelic FingerSensingPad (/dev/input/event6)
[ 17.481] (**) FSPPS/2 Sentelic FingerSensingPad: Applying InputClass "evdev pointer catchall"
[ 17.481] (**) FSPPS/2 Sentelic FingerSensingPad: always reports core events
[ 17.481] (**) FSPPS/2 Sentelic FingerSensingPad: Device: "/dev/input/event6"
[ 17.500] (II) FSPPS/2 Sentelic FingerSensingPad: Found 11 mouse buttons
[ 17.500] (II) FSPPS/2 Sentelic FingerSensingPad: Found scroll wheel(s)
[ 17.500] (II) FSPPS/2 Sentelic FingerSensingPad: Found relative axes
[ 17.500] (II) FSPPS/2 Sentelic FingerSensingPad: Found x and y relative axes
[ 17.500] (II) FSPPS/2 Sentelic FingerSensingPad: Configuring as mouse
[ 17.500] (**) FSPPS/2 Sentelic FingerSensingPad: YAxisMapping: buttons 4 and 5
[ 17.500] (**) FSPPS/2 Sentelic FingerSensingPad: EmulateWheelButton: 4, EmulateWheelInertia: 10, EmulateWheelTimeout: 200
[ 17.500] (II) XINPUT: Adding extended input device "FSPPS/2 Sentelic FingerSensingPad" (type: MOUSE)
[ 17.500] (II) FSPPS/2 Sentelic FingerSensingPad: initialized for relative axes.
[ 17.500] (II) config/udev: Adding input device FSPPS/2 Sentelic FingerSensingPad (/dev/input/mouse0)
Best Answer
There is an open bug report for this issue on Launchpad. While support for this touchpad has improved quite a bit since I bought my MSI X-Series notebook, it's obviously incomplete, as you noticed. From what I've gathered in that bug report, Sentelic released an open source Linux driver for the touchpad awhile ago, which has been partially merged into the Linux kernel. Unfortunately, from comment 71 of the bug report, it sounds like Sentelic has also raised patent concerns, which seem to be blocking the current development of the open source driver.
The ultimate goal, at least from what I've read on the mailing list, is to hand off the control of scrolling (and multi-touch?) to the Synaptics driver. And to quote the bug report one more time, "To fix this bug properly, Sentelic’s source for absolute positioning needs to be re-added to the driver."
Right now, I don't know of anyone actively working on this, but I'm in the same boat as you, and I would love to have multi-touch (or at least usable edge-scrolling) working on my laptop. Maybe we should start bribing people. :)