After the release of the Ubuntu Multi-Touch stack called UTouch and the X.Org Gesture Extension, the rising question would be the support of everyday applications, as only a few applications in Ubuntu 10.10 will properly support UTouch. Standard applications which are non-multi-touch-aware only recognize events which come from the keyboard and the mouse like key-presses and mouse clicks.

Whether you believe the iPad hype or not, it's clear that touchscreen devices represent an important emerging hardware niche. Canonical responded to that reality recently with the release of uTouch 1.0, a software stack designed to ensure solid multi-touch and gesture support on Ubuntu.  Here are the details, along with some thoughts.

Nokia's QT Software has upgraded its "Qt" cross-platform application and UI framework, now featuring multi-touch and gesture support.

I spoke with Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical, this morning, and he tells me that Canonical will be bringing true multi-touch to Ubuntu Linux in Ubuntu 10.10 (code name Maverick Meerkat).

When Canonical broke the news recently that Ubuntu 10.10 will include uTouch 1.0, a multitouch and gesture stack, it caused a flurry of excitement about the Linux release's potential for use in tablets.

Android developers looking forward to the inclusion of multi-touch support in the upcoming release of Google's open source mobile operating system, code named "Donut", will need to wait even longer. It was previously believed that Donut, which would see a final release as Android version 2.0, would include the much anticipated multi-touch gesture support.

The upcoming open-source mobile OS will offer gesture-based touch commands along with Web 2.0 support and the opportunity for customization

We're less than one month until the next Ubuntu release, 10.10. Maverick Meerkat, as it is codenamed, is scheduled for release on October 10, 2010, and, as always, Canonical put out a beta calling for users to test-drive it and report problems and bugs.

Track pads on Linux notebooks set to improve with the OEM only release of Synaptics Gesture Suite for Linux