I have a Dell Inspiron 1501 laptop running Arch Linux, and recently, after an update, the Synaptics touchpad stopped working.
The touchpad shows up in dmesg as:
Synaptics Touchpad, model: 1, fw: 6.3, id: 0x180b1, caps: 0xa04713/0x200000 input: SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad as /class/input/input7
I was using a USB mouse until I found time to get the touchpad working again. Here’s what I had to do…
I had to first install a driver for the pad – the Arch package was xf86-input-synaptics.
Next, I edited xorg.conf and added:
Section "InputDevice" Identifier "Touchpad" Driver "synaptics" Option "Protocol" "auto" Option "Device" "/dev/input/mice" Option "SendCoreEvents" "true" Option "SHMConfig" "1" Option "TouchpadOff" "0" Option "TapButton1" "1" EndSection
SHMConfig allows the synclient utility to change settings via shared memory once Xorg is running (don’t enable this on a shared system as other users could potentially change your settings; however, most laptops tend to only be used by one person :)
TouchpadOff should be set to 0 to allow all touchpad functionality.
TapButton1 determines what button click is simulated on a single-finger tap on the touchpad; I’ve set it to 1, which indiates the left mouse button. (You could also set TapButton2 and TapButton3 which decide what button press to simulate for two-finger and three-finger taps respectively.)
Here’s a much more detailed Synaptics Linux driver reference.
Once you’ve added the above to Xorg.conf, add a line to the ServerLayout section to make use of it:
InputDevice "Touchpad" "CorePointer"
You should now be able to make use of the touchpad.
You should be able to use the synclient utility to verify the settings which are currently in use – for example:
[davidp@masterplan:~]$ synclient -l Parameter settings: LeftEdge = 1632 RightEdge = 5312 TopEdge = 1575 BottomEdge = 4281 FingerLow = 24 FingerHigh = 29 FingerPress = 255 MaxTapTime = 180 MaxTapMove = 221 MaxDoubleTapTime = 180 SingleTapTimeout = 180 ClickTime = 100 FastTaps = 0 EmulateMidButtonTime = 75 EmulateTwoFingerMinZ = 280 VertScrollDelta = 100 HorizScrollDelta = 100 VertEdgeScroll = 0 HorizEdgeScroll = 0 CornerCoasting = 0 VertTwoFingerScroll = 1 HorizTwoFingerScroll = 0 MinSpeed = 0.4 MaxSpeed = 0.7 AccelFactor = 0.00995223 TrackstickSpeed = 40 EdgeMotionMinZ = 29 EdgeMotionMaxZ = 159 EdgeMotionMinSpeed = 1 EdgeMotionMaxSpeed = 401 EdgeMotionUseAlways = 0 UpDownScrolling = 1 LeftRightScrolling = 1 UpDownScrollRepeat = 1 LeftRightScrollRepeat = 1 ScrollButtonRepeat = 100 TouchpadOff = 0 GuestMouseOff = 0 LockedDrags = 0 LockedDragTimeout = 5000 RTCornerButton = 0 RBCornerButton = 0 LTCornerButton = 0 LBCornerButton = 0 TapButton1 = 1 TapButton2 = 0 TapButton3 = 0 ClickFinger1 = 1 ClickFinger2 = 1 ClickFinger3 = 1 CircularScrolling = 0 CircScrollDelta = 0.1 CircScrollTrigger = 0 CircularPad = 0 PalmDetect = 0 PalmMinWidth = 10 PalmMinZ = 199 CoastingSpeed = 0 PressureMotionMinZ = 29 PressureMotionMaxZ = 159 PressureMotionMinFactor = 1 PressureMotionMaxFactor = 1 GrabEventDevice = 1
One extra feature I discovered after setting this up is the ability to scroll via a double-fingered drag on the touchpad – if you drag two fingers along the pad, it simulates a mousewheel being rotated, for easy scrolling. Really quite useful.
Seriously, just get a Mac and stop having to worry about this stupid stuff.
Also: this is your own laptop. You yourself say that you’re not worried about it being more than a single-user machine. Why, then, is your username “davidp”?
(Also, if comments will appear in a normal proportionally-spaced font, why is this textarea styled as 10 point Courier New?)
@Sam: Heh, maybe one day. For now though, I’m happy with Linux, and happy to put up with the occasional fix needed when I upgrade stuff.
As for the username – at PIPEX, my username on all machines was ‘davidp’, so I used that on my personal machines, too (muscle memory is good). These days, my username at work is just ‘dave’, but I’ve pretty much stuck with ‘davidp’ at home.
As for the comments area being in a Monospace font, well, that’s how I want it :)
very nice tutorial… keep it up..
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keep it up…..
thank you for this tuturial. It’s very helpful.
You have updated from ufficial repositories or unufficial?