Code named Maverick Meerkat, the next version of the Linux distribution Ubuntu 10.10 will support multitouch gestures with technology.
The next version of Ubuntu is expected by October 10, 2010 and will take over the multitouch gestures made on a touch screen. Canonical, the official sponsor of Ubuntu has just made the announcement. This support is possible through the integration of uTouch Framework 1.0.
For this new technology multitouch, Canonical said to have worked closely with the communities behind the Linux kernel and X.org drivers to improve, add support for missing features. The connotation open source is here very strong. The code of Canonical and the multitouch is hosted on Launchpad and licensed under GPLv3 and LGPLv3.
With this advance, Mark Shuttlworth, founder of Ubuntu, expects to be able to fly with the fingers all the main applications of the distribution, which he expects to Ubuntu 11.04 (April 2011) provided that developers play the game with APIs at their disposal. The maturity should be reached a year later with Ubuntu 12.04.
Already with Ubuntu 10.10, some Gtk applications will be able to support actions based on the scrolling (scrolling). The Evince document viewer benefit for its special treatment in that area to serve as a demonstration of the possibilities of interactions with the multitouch.
The multitouch also involve the window manager in Unity, the environment that we find in Ubuntu Netbook Edition 10/10, nothing to prevent install Unity in the desktop edition of Ubuntu. Canonical also indicates that multitouch will be valid for Ubuntu Desktop, Netbook and products Light who stand for Unity and the environment are developed with OEMs.
Mark Shuttleworth says that currently, the Dell XT2 Tablet PC acts as a development environment to support multitouch technology with Ubuntu. It is with this latter that the best results may be obtained yet.
