multi-touch gestures on Thinkpad T61

I'm currently running elementaryOS Freya on my Thinkpad T61 and want to use multi-touch gestures. Out of the box I can use 2-finger swipes for scrolling (although it works rather badly with this OS). $ grep "TouchPad: buttons:" /var/log/Xorg.0.log gives me this output: (--) synaptics: SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad: buttons: left right middle double triple so my touchpad is definitely capable of 3-finger gestures. However, I've tried for days now to get touchegg, ginn or xSwipe to work but when I enter the test-mode via touchegg or ginn in the terminal, it doesn't register any input at all, not even a simple tap. Possible solutions that I've already tried include: deactivating all native gestures in the synaptics driver $ synclient VertTwoFingerScroll=0 $ synclient HorizTwoFingerScroll=0 $ synclient TapButton1=0 $ synclient TapButton2=0 $ synclient TapButton3=0 $ synclient ClickFinger1=0 $ synclient ClickFinger2=0 $ synclient ClickFinger3=0 $ synclient PalmDetect=0 $ synclient GrabEventDevice=0 using evdev driver instead of synaptics (in /etc/X11/xorg.conf as well as /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/50-synaptics.conf) Section "InputClass" Identifier "evdev touchpad catchall" Driver "evdev" MatchDevicePath "/dev/input/event*" MatchIsTouchpad "on" Option "Protocol" "event" Option "SHMConfig" "on" EndSection and downgrading to an older version of the synaptics driver as recommended in the installation instructions for xSwipe $ sudo apt-get remove xserver-xorg-input-synaptics $ sudo apt-get install build-essential libevdev-dev $ autoconf automake libmtdev-dev xorg-dev xutils-dev libtool git libx11-guitest-perl $ git clone https://github.com/felipejfc/xserver-xorg-input-synaptics.git $ cd xserver-xorg-input-synaptics/ $ ./autogen.sh $ ./configure --exec_prefix=/usr $ make $ sudo make install I also installed touchegg in a xubuntu live environment to rule out incompatibility with elementaryOS.