Ubuntu 18.04 Touchscreen Kiosk – Disable Multi-Touch Gestures

gnome 18.04 chromium touchscreen multi-touch

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It seems these gestures cannot be disabled with gsettings.

However, the Gnome Shell Extension "Disable Gestures" worked perfectly for me.

Automated Installation

I recently added an installation command to gnome-shell-extension-tool. This is not merged into upstream yet. But the whole tool is just a single Python 3 script. So you can simply download and use my patched version of the file and run the following to install and enable [email protected]:

# Download extension
wget "https://extensions.gnome.org/extension-data/disable-gestures%40mattbell.com.au.v2.shell-extension.zip"

# Install extension
gnome-shell-extension-tool -i [email protected].*.zip

# Enable extension
gnome-shell-extension-tool -e [email protected]

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Enijar

In my free-time I like to tinker with a bunch of languages and try out different things. When I'm not tinkering around, or working on open-source projects, I'm usually working. I lead a medium-sized team of Full Stack developers, working on a variety of things, from websites through to mobile apps, games, backend tools, and kiosk touchscreens/apps. Here is my preferred stack when working: PHP - using Laravel to do the heavy-lifting backend work and building RESTful APIs JavaScript - React with React Router for building SPAs CSS - for 2D and 3D animations Bash - for scripting and general purpose tooling HomeBrew - for package management MacOS - It's unix and is the best environment I've found for my stack

Updated on September 18, 2022

Comments

Enijar almost 2 years

I'm running a kiosk touchscreen through Chromium. I've got it setup so that a Chromium application is running with the --kiosk flag, which prevents access to the OS.

The problem I have is with the multi-touch gestures. The gestures I would like to disable for GNOME are listed here and are 3 and 4 touch gestures. These gestures allow users to exit the Chromium kiosk application, which is obviously not what a user should be able to do.

My question is, how do I disable these multi-touch gestures?

If possible I would like to enable/disable these multi-touch gestures from the command line as part of my startup script.

Edit: I've recorded a video demonstration of the multi-touch gesture if the Ubuntu multi-touch document wasn't clear.
- ponsfrilus almost 6 years
  
  See bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/unity/+bug/1589520 → you should have a look in gsettings (e.g. gsettings list-keys com.canonical.Unity.Gestures).
- Enijar almost 6 years
  
  @ponsfrilus 18.04 doesn't use Unity; GNOME is used instead. Is there something under org.gnome.*?
- ponsfrilus almost 6 years
  
  these settings are available in Ubuntu 18.04 running GNOME. You can check the full list with gsettings list-schemas. You can also search if it's feasible with xinput...
Enijar over 5 years

I have seen this, but is there a way to automate the installation of this extension as part of my provisioning script?
raphinesse over 5 years

@Enijar I added installation instructions.
Jonathan Tuzman over 4 years

I'm getting gnome-shell-extension-tool: error: no such option: -i
raphinesse over 4 years

@JonathanTuzman Did you use my patched version of gnome-shell-extension-tool? My changes were never merged into the upstream version, so the -i option is not available there.
drakorg about 3 years

Hi, I'm facing the same problem OP was, but I'm not able to get rid of this behavior. I'm running Ubuntu 18.04 with this disable-gestures extension but nothing has changed. I'm getting increasingly frustrated with this. @Enijar did you finally manage to get rid of it? Could you please walk again thru the steps in case I missed something? Thanks a lot
Enijar about 3 years

@Eduardo this is the script I ended up using to install and run kiosk apps through Google Chrome: gist.github.com/Enijar/30572e82b4cbf2e155c6d67a39bbfd02
drakorg about 3 years

Thanks for the followup, but I have finally solved it. Just for the record, in my case the problem was that despite the fact that I was indeed using Ubuntu 18.04 (which I thought according to every reference I found was using gnome), it turned to be that it came preinstalled with unity (actual unity, not gnome made to look like unity). So, all the extensions did nothing. Once I realized this, I just removed unity and stuck with gnome, where the extensions did what they were meant to. Problem solved. In any case thank you and best regards.