How can I get multitouch enabled on my Sentelic touchpad (msi x350 notebook)?

There is an open bug report for this issue on Launchpad. While support for this touchpad has improved quite a bit since I bought my MSI X-Series notebook, it's obviously incomplete, as you noticed. From what I've gathered in that bug report, Sentelic released an open source Linux driver for the touchpad awhile ago, which has been partially merged into the Linux kernel. Unfortunately, from comment 71 of the bug report, it sounds like Sentelic has also raised patent concerns, which seem to be blocking the current development of the open source driver.

The ultimate goal, at least from what I've read on the mailing list, is to hand off the control of scrolling (and multi-touch?) to the Synaptics driver. And to quote the bug report one more time, "To fix this bug properly, Sentelic’s source for absolute positioning needs to be re-added to the driver."

Right now, I don't know of anyone actively working on this, but I'm in the same boat as you, and I would love to have multi-touch (or at least usable edge-scrolling) working on my laptop. Maybe we should start bribing people. :)

3 solutions you might want to give a shot:

• Try GPointing-Device-Settings. It is the successor of GSynaptics, and has a wider range of hardware devices supported (it is not limited only to Synaptics)

• Upgrade your kernel to (at least) 2.6.32. Thats the default in Ubuntu 10.04 and beyond. Quoting from Gentoo Wiki: The Sentelic touchpad comes with a couple of laptops/Netbooks. They have recently released a driver for linux that will need patching the kernel. Note: From 2.6.32 the driver is included in the kernel

• Try this official driver. There is a detailed how-to at http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=9603498&postcount=3

I hope one of them works for you! :)