I was talking to a friend who owns a Mac. He has his set up so that when he swipes three fingers across his touchpad, it moves to the workspace in that direction. Is it possible to set this up in Ubuntu?
Your touchpad (hardware) needs to support this feature and you then may need to configure your touchpad (Ubuntu automatically recognizes and enables some hardware).
One common drier is synaptic. You can enable two finger scrolling from the mouse and touchpad section in the control panel.
If you wish additional options you will need to manually edit a few configuration files and the options are hardware dependent.
There is a debugging page here:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DebuggingTouchpadDetection
Take a look at that page, if you can identify your hardware we can perhaps give you more specific assistance.
An example of hardware specific guides: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Multitouch/AppleMagicTrackpad
You can also take a look at "easystroke"
http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/easystroke/wiki
Here is a demo of easystroke in action: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CagAEgXAAzA
