Is it possible to get dragging working on a Macbook multi-touch touch pad?

Question

I have a Macbook 5,1. That is to say that it is the only 13 inch aluminium Macbook as the later revisions were renamed Macbook Pro.

Two-finger scrolling seems to work fine but dragging doesn't work. In OsX this works so that you point an object, click and keep your finger pressed on the touch pad while slide another finger to move the cursor. This causes weird and undefined behavior in Ubuntu as it seems the driver doesn't recognize this as dragging. Any ideas?

Solution 1

Thumb-down dragging in Ubuntu Maverick on newer Macbook( Pro)s is currently supported only by the new, currently non-configurable, but quite functional independently written "multitouch" X input driver from the mactel PPA. (Canonical hasn't written utouch support for MB(P)s yet.)

From one of the official Macbook or MacBook Pro Maverick hardware support pages--

To enable the multitouch drivers, add the mactel ppa:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mactel-support && sudo apt-get update

Then run this in a console:

sudo apt-get install xf86-input-multitouch bcm5974-dkms

Then add this to the new file /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/99-multitouch.conf (on Maverick and later) with the same permissions as the other files in the directory:

Section "InputClass"
    MatchIsTouchpad "true"
    Identifier "Multitouch Touchpad"
    Driver "multitouch"
EndSection

You can then get three-finger gestures working using mouse "buttons" 8, 9, 10, and 11 (use xev to view them) via imwheel (Ubuntu universe). I'm going to finish that part another day, though xev is clearly showing the "press" of the "buttons" to indicate it's ready to be hooked up.

To see if this applies to your model, you should go to Ubuntu.com Help Community MacBook or MacBookPro page and find your system, or something close to it, for the Ubuntu version you are using (stick to the correct version!) in the grey box on the right at the top. Currently, many of the systems have out-of-date or incomplete information. However, Apple changes little between versions, so you'll be able to use information from almost any machine's page (read them all!). The MacBook Pro 7,1 Maverick page has the most complete information for Maverick as far as I've seen, though the Maverick MBP 5,5, 5,3, and 6,2 pages also have info not found elsewhere that I needed. That's where this information came from.

More info on PPAs:

• Mactel wiki page
• What are PPAs and how do I use them?

Solution 2

Just have a look at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MacBookPro7-1/Maverick

It describes the necessary steps to get Ubuntu working, e.g.

two-finger scrolling and horizontal scrolling can be enabled through the mouse preferences

I'm using my Macbook with Ubuntu everyday. Though a small number of technical things on OSX still work better (faster WLAN connect, faster sleep/wakeup), I'm much more satisfied with the usability of Ubuntu, the package-management and the available open-source-software.

Solution 3

The driver on my MacBook Air that was installed for 11.10 is called "multitouch" (perhaps it is the same one mentioned in another answer), but I had the same issue with not being able to use two finger click and drag. I finally found the mtrack driver, which I found can be tweaked to behave nearly like the OS X driver, including two finger click and drag.

See my post here: https://askubuntu.com/a/103030/43660 for instructions on how to install and configure mtrack.

Comments

[jondavidjohn]

In terms of the scrolling for example, is it smooth and eased with momentum like in OSX? or is it jumpy.

[Admin]

Jumpy. Scrolling is moving a page 5 pixels at a time. It's not pretty.

[A Student at a University]

Also some info at blog.fejes.ca/?paged=4