Synaptics

Personal

Well, well. I updated my xorg synaptics driver, and…. the damn thing stopped working. That is, the touchpad worked, but not through the synaptics driver, so it would be really badly configured. I like my touchpad to be correctly configured. As a matter of fact, I put this file into ~/.kde4/Autostart/ :

#!/bin/bash
fetchmail
synclient SingleTapTimeout=0.5
synclient   MinSpeed=0.1
synclient   MaxSpeed=1
synclient   AccelFactor=0.3
synclient   ClickTime=10
synclient   EdgeMotionMinSpeed=30
synclient   EdgeMotionMaxSpeed=150
synclient   VertScrollDelta=24
synclient   UpDownScrollRepeat=1
synclient   PressureMotionMaxFactor=2
synclient   HorizEdgeScroll=0
synclient   VertEdgeScroll=1
synclient   VertTwoFingerScroll=1
synclient   HorizTwoFingerScroll=0
synclient   PalmMinZ=30
killall syndaemon
syndaemon -i 0.6 -d -K
killall hotkeys
hotkeys -t inspiron8100

As you can see, this starts my fetchmail daemon, sets up the config of the touchpad through the synclient program, and also starts “syndaemon”, which disables the touchpad while typing – VERY helpful, mind you, since when programming, I always put my finger on the touchpad by accident, and suddenly everything gets messed up. Also, it sets up the hotkeys program, which will make my volume-up and volume-down keys working (I have a Dell D420, thanks INRIA ;) )

Anyway, I finally had a look at /var/log/Xorg.0.log and, well, synaptics didn’t find the touchpad. So, I had a look around the Internet, and apparently, others had the same issue with the new driver! So, finally, I had a look around, and I managed to cut-and-paste-and-edit the relevant section of xorg.conf to:

Section "InputDevice"
Driver      "synaptics"
#     Option "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
Option "Protocol" "auto-dev"
Option "Emulate3Buttons" "yes"
Option "SHMConfig" "on"
Option "SendCoreEvents" "true"
Option "TapButton1" "1"
Option "TapButton2" "2"
Identifier  "TouchPad"
EndSection

Which finally made the thing work again through synaptics! What you have to notice here is:

  • SHMConfig is NOT “true” but “on”. Important for new Xorg servers.
  • Device is NOT given, so that Xorg can automatically find it!
  • SendCoreEvents is set to “true”

Hooraaay! :D