How to really use multitouch gestures now

Solution 1:

Goto System > Preferences > Mouse. Click on the Touchpad tab and select two finger scrolling. Click Close and it should now work.

Solution 2:

There's actually no support currently for two-finger scroll on touch screens. The current support for two-finger scroll is implemented in the synaptics X driver, which is tailored for touch pad use, and probably won't behave properly with a touch screen.

So, although you've got two-finger multitouch happening there's not currently any support for turning a two-finger drag gesture into a scroll event. This needs toolkit (GTK+, Qt, etc) support. I'd expect the Canonical DX touch team, who are working on the multitouch stack, will implement this support in the next couple of releases.

Since the multitouch protocol stuff is almost available in an upstream X server there should soon be more people able to work on this, too; not just people working on Ubuntu.

At the moment (Ubuntu 11.10), this is a missing feature.