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Ubuntu 10.10 Multitouch Support Demo
Timothy found a news report and a little video demonstrating the multi-touch capabilities of Ubuntu. It's attached below if you're curious what the new Unity Netbook UI is looking like these days.
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One thing that wasn't mentioned in the article text or accompanying video that I am curious about, how does text input work? When a text bar or area is activated does it bring up a keyboard?
Can it do pinch zoom? Two finger scrolling or one finger? Will two fingers simulate a right-click? (It's a mostly desktop OS, so unlike in iOS right clicking is probably pretty useful). I'm sure I could find out the answers, but if you're going to make a promo video for "multi-touch" show me some "multi-touching".
From the article:
One of the coolest things though is one that will be experienced by the fewest people at this point – touch. Unity is fully touch-enabled – those big icons are screaming out to have a digit poked at them. But as ever, the boys in the lab, or in this case Duncan McGregor‘s multi-touch team have gone a step further and created a multi-touch ‘gesture’ library. This allows finger combinations to do groovy things like expand and reduce windows, pull up multiple windows in one workspace, and call up the ‘dash’ automatically. These are in 10.10. In 11.04 we will see a lot more.
So I'd say, no, it doesn't have more than just what they demonstrated
At least not yet. But you'll probably have a lot of them delivered by, interestingly enough, Natty Narwhal (which is odd because Narwhals don't look like they'd be too interested in multitouch).
Given that I'm sure the multitouch library will expand even more significantly for 11.10, I'd like to make a suggestion for the name: Omnipotent Octopus.
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I recently got an Asus EEE (1001px) netbook as a gift, and it came with Windows 7 starter. Now, I use windows 7 at home (ultimate) and I don't dislike it, but I was very unhappy with starter. You can't even change the background image, I mean, what the fuck.
Anyways, I used to use linux (I mean, like 10 years ago when I was in highschool I used to use debian and slackware), but haven't really since. I decided to try ubuntu so I did a USB installation and put 10.10 netbook edition. I have to say, it was just as easy (if not easier) than a win7 installation (which I have to do often), and is WAY better on a netbook.
I think people who say linux is popular on portables are exactly right. It's an awesome fit, and I love it.