Synaptics Touchpad recognition inside a VM

[Immunos]

Hello everybody.

I have a laptop with synaptics touchpad. My host is Windows 10, my guest Ubuntu 17.04. Host has the touchpad drivers installed and recognizes gestures up to 4 finger tapping. Now i would love to have those features inside my virtual machine as well. Best i did with the installing of guest additions is two finger vertical scrolling. I did some googling and my suspicion is that virtualbox kinda "translates" my touchpad gestures and makes the vm recognize it as mouse movements. Hence i suppose: two-finger scrolling->mouse wheel usage.

Typing "xinput" in guest terminal does not list the synaptics touchpad as well, just the virtualbox things. I would love to make the guest see my touchpad directly, so i could make the synaptics drivers on Ubuntu work. My goal is the mac-like three finger workspace swap and so on. However i am afraid that this is impossible just because of the way in which Virtualbox actually works.

In addition i have also found something weird. Ubuntu recognizes three fingers left/right swipe. In terminal the left swipe makes "C" appear and the right swipe makes "D" appear. Inside a browser those gestures make me step one page back/forward. I have a feeling that here might lie the possible workaround. I have tried Easystroke to map the gestures to do what i want, however it was unable to recognize any stroke i did. I also used touchegg to remap the gesture to send the key combination for workspace switching which is: "Ctrl+Alt+arrow key", also without any effect, as it did not recognize any three finger gestures when run.

Here rises my ultimate question: Is there any way to bypass it and make Ubuntu recognize more gestures than two finger vertical scrolling/see my touchpad directly? Or remap those three finger gestures which kinda(because the actually do something) are recognized to match my purposes? I suspect that they are something like undefined behaviour, hence the "C" and "D" in terminal. However i might be totally wrong because i am a bit new to all this.

Best regards to anyone who could be of assistance

[mpack]

Here rises my ultimate question: Is there any way to bypass it and make Ubuntu recognize more gestures than two finger vertical scrolling/see my touchpad directly?

As a general rule: all of the hardware of a VM is simulated. The actual hardware of the host, and its features, is mostly not relevant. Your Synaptics device will never be directly visible to the guest OS unless you steal ownership from the host, and that would not lead to good results.

By default the VM emulates a PS/2 mouse. In that case VirtualBox doesn't concern itself with gestures etc at all, it leaves that to the host OS. As a Windows app it receives mouse messages which it converts into simulated mouse movements and button clicks which it passes to the PS/2 mouse simulation which passes it to the guest OS. Note that it's your host OS (possibly actually the host touchpad driver) which translates gestures into mouse messages, not VirtualBox.

p.s. VirtualBox recently added "USB tablet" and "USB multi-touch tablet" as alternative input simulations (see "VM settings|System|Motherboard|Pointing Device" pulldown menu). The manual seems to mainly discuss these in relation to Windows guests, so I don't know if these would work (my guests are mostly Windows, I'm not a Linux user). Perhaps you can experiment.

p.p.s. Moving this topic to "Linux Guests".