Fedora 9 - How to ENABLE Synaptics touchpad
 

Hello Everyone,

I now have Fedora 9 installed on my secondary laptop, Toshiba Equium L10. I would like to enable the Synaptics touchpad, but search google and this forum, all I seem to find is instructions on DISABLING this. This is a brand new install and xorg.conf makes no mention of the touchpad, and I have the proper drivers installed. When I attempt to open the touchpad GUI, I get the error as follows:

There is no available option for that in my xorg.conf:

There are no option set for the mouse or touchpad, just the keyboard,
If anyone who has their Synaptics touchpad working on a similar laptop would be so kind, could you post the section of you xorg.conf file which I can copy/paste to get this thing working?

Thank you in advance...

Bob

Then write it in.

Thanks for that response..I did add it myself and it still doesn't work. However, I have found that this seems to be a bug that some have overcome and others not. The default in Fedora 9 is to install on laptops with synaptics touchpads with the touch/tap function disabled. There are a number of suggested fixes in the Fedora forum, but none worked for me. Hopefully this will be fixed in the final release and maybe this post with offer some useful information to someonelse with the problem.

Bob

Yep, this is a bug. Some, like me, can't get it to work at all in Fedora 9:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=439386

I hope that this problem has been solved in the final version of fedora 9...

Not being one to give up on a something that bugs me, I thought would add to this post the things I have done to track down this problem. It is still not solved, but some oddities about it are interesting. As I pointed out in a previous post, this is a known bug in Fedora 9, but it is one that must go very deep into the system because all log files and config files suggest there is no reason why the touchpad is not working. First of all, all Synaptic drivers and libraries are installed. The relevant snippet from xorg.conf:

The results from /var/log/Xorg.0.log:

The results of attempting to start the daemon:

As it can be seen, there is nothing that should be disabling the touchpad function. But, it is interesting to note that during the boot process after udev is started, once the graphical loading process is seen, I can use the touchpad to tap "SEE DETAILS" and it of course changes screens to show the text. So, obviously a process is loaded sometime in between that disables it and makes it impossible to enable.

If there are any experts who have any thoughts, I would appreciate the input. I have wrapped the above in PHP code to highlight the relevant entries.

Regards

Bob

Hey guys...i'm a noob at linux and i was having the same problem as mentioned above. This solved my problem h t t p :// atrpms.net/dist/f9/synaptics/

I just intalled the new drivers there... Hope this help =)

SHMConfig fedora 9, xorg.conf
 

I've had the same problem with fedora 9 on my Dell d810.

Initially I tried what I do on my Ubuntu system, with an older xorg. Like everyone else, I had no success in getting Xorg to recognize SHMConfig (or any other synaptics options)

I figured it out... and My touch pad is Finally speedier! (SHMConfig "on" works too now.



1. You must first Identify your touchpad in the serverlayout, I added a new line to the to the section:
2. You can then add an inputDevice section for your touchpad that will be recognized, the device needs to be identified as the same name from step 1. In my case, I named it "SynapticsTouchpad"




3. After I added those two things(new line to ServerLoayout, and the InputDevice section for the touchpad), I was able to finally speed up the movement, and configuration from the dektop works with gsynaptic

This did the trick for me too - thanks!

SOLVED-For ME TOO
 

Thanks to all who replied. Just as others have posted, I solved this one with a simple driver update I found on the Fedora Forum. It is probably the same driver mentioned.

But, got it working, with just the sensitivity I wanted. Gsynaptics still doesn't work (gives the same SHMconfig error) but it is umimportant as long as the touchpad works.

Thanks again

Bob

Awesome, just what I was looking for!

Hi.


I've tried the proposed solutions in getting the touchpad to work, but without any success. My touchpad is still not responding at all. Anyone got any thoughts on how to further debug this?

Btw, I've recently migrated from Ubuntu to Fedora 9. The touchpad problem seemed to start with a kernel upgrade while running Ubuntu a few months back. Don't recall the version of the latest successful kernel though. :/

Regards,
kenneho

Post #4 - see if the bug applies to you.
Post #6 - what do your logs say?

There has been an update to Xorg that has been messing with many people.

I thought I'd provide an extract of my Xorg.0.log file. I look similar to the one presented by "BobNutfield". Here it goes...

[HTML]
(II) Synaptics touchpad driver version 0.14.6 (1406)
Synaptics no synaptics event device found (checked 18 nodes)
(**) Option "Device" "/dev/input/event0"
(**) Option "SHMConfig" "on"
Query no Synaptics: 000000
(EE) Synaptics no synaptics touchpad detected and no repeater device
(EE) Synaptics Unable to query/initialize Synaptics hardware.
(EE) PreInit failed for input device "Synaptics"
(II) UnloadModule: "synaptics"
(WW) <default pointer>: No Device specified, looking for one...
(II) <default pointer>: Setting Device option to "/dev/input/mice"
(--) <default pointer>: Device: "/dev/input/mice"
(==) <default pointer>: Protocol: "Auto"
(**) Option "CorePointer"
(**) <default pointer>: always reports core events
(==) <default pointer>: Emulate3Buttons, Emulate3Timeout: 50
(**) <default pointer>: ZAxisMapping: buttons 4 and 5
(**) <default pointer>: Buttons: 9
(**) <default pointer>: Sensitivity: 1
(II) evaluating device (<default pointer>)
(II) XINPUT: Adding extended input device "<default pointer>" (type: MOUSE)

(II) evaluating device (Keyboard0)
(II) XINPUT: Adding extended input device "Keyboard0" (type: KEYBOARD)
(II) <default pointer>: Setting mouse protocol to "ExplorerPS/2"
(II) <default pointer>: ps2EnableDataReporting: succeeded
(II) config/hal: Adding input device Macintosh mouse button emulation
(II) LoadModule: "evdev"

(II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/input//evdev_drv.so
(II) Module evdev: vendor="X.Org Foundation"
compiled for 0.0.0, module version = 1.0.0
Module class: X.Org XInput Driver
ABI class: X.Org XInput driver, version 2.1
(**) Macintosh mouse button emulation: always reports core events
(**) Macintosh mouse button emulation: Device: "/dev/input/event0"
(II) Macintosh mouse button emulation: Found x and y relative axes
(II) Macintosh mouse button emulation: Found mouse buttons
(II) Macintosh mouse button emulation: Configuring as mouse
(II) XINPUT: Adding extended input device "Macintosh mouse button emulation" (type: MOUSE)
[/HTML]

And here's my xorg.conf file. The added lines were grabbed from https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=439386

[HTML]
# Xorg configuration created by pyxf86config

Section "ServerLayout"
Identifier "Default Layout"
Screen 0 "Screen0" 0 0
InputDevice "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"
InputDevice "Synaptics" #Added this line
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
# keyboard added by rhpxl
Identifier "Keyboard0"
Driver "kbd"
Option "XkbModel" "pc105"
Option "XkbLayout" "no"
EndSection

Section "Device"
Identifier "Videocard0"
Driver "radeon"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
Identifier "Screen0"
Device "Videocard0"
DefaultDepth 24
SubSection "Display"
Viewport 0 0
Depth 24
EndSubSection
EndSection

# Added this section
Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Synaptics"
Driver "synaptics"
Option "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
Option "Protocol" "auto-dev"
Option "Emulate3Buttons" "yes"
Option "SHMConfig" "on"
Option "SendCoreEvents" "true"
EndSection

[/HTML]

My touchpad is still completely non-responsive. I'm not sure how to further debug this, so I'd very much appreciate some advice.

Regards,
kenneho

Solved
 

Suddenly my touchpad started working again. Don't know why - I haven't made any changes to the system since my previous post. Very strange..