Set Synaptics preferences when distro has no xorg.conf

mrider · 10-31-2009, 04:46 PM

Greetings all:

This one is driving me crazy. I have a somewhat older Mac laptop and the right side of the touchpad is placed such that the palm of my right hand causes "tap" and "scroll" events while typing. Currently I'm forced to use xinput to switch the mouse totally off, and then I use an external mouse. I also wouldn't mind tweaking some of the Mac's more annoying keyboard choices.

Ordinarily, I'd just make a few edits to xorg.conf, and use synclient/syndaemon. But I'm testing out Kubuntu 9.10 and it doesn't have an xorg file. I've tried Googling for the problem, but no luck so far. Every link I find talks about how to exit xorg.conf (which I already know), and nobody talks about what to do if there is no xorg.conf. Presumably that's because the concept is so new.

How does one adjust settings like this without an xorg file? Will it work if I create one? and if so, what should it look like? Or is there some other file I should be editing?

Any pointers to a man page or links to a web page would be greatly appreciated.

Mr-Bisquit · 10-31-2009, 05:02 PM

http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.p...uchpad#p257111

mrider · 10-31-2009, 05:10 PM

Thank you for that link, I hadn't seen that page yet.

But again, that post talks about how to edit xorg.conf. I don't have one. So should I create one? What should it look like? If there is an xorg.conf file, will it have to have all the old sections like it used to? Or do I just include a mouse section?

knudfl · 10-31-2009, 07:03 PM

I guess, you have some Ubuntu live cd's, older than 9.10.

Just run the live cd on the computer in question,
and save the xorg.conf to usb-key or to Google Docs.

Or may be, you have a backup with xorg.conf files ?
.....

mrider · 10-31-2009, 07:24 PM

Not a bad idea. No this is the first time I've run Linux on bare metal on this machine, but I've never quite warmed up to OSx - so I went out and got an all new HDD and now I'm dinking around trying to decide which distro to finally keep.

But yeah, I can always run a live distro and copy the xorg.conf file from that.

Thanks for the tip!

I'll post back with results in case someone lands here from Google.

knudfl · 11-01-2009, 01:59 AM

OK , then : Ubuntu is not the best to create an xorg.conf,
anyway. In fact, it's the worst.

The most versatile are 1) PCLinuxOS 2007 ... 2009,
2) The Sabayon KDE - DVD version 3.x .

colorpurple21859 · 11-01-2009, 07:27 AM

run Xorg -configure, without x running, which will create an xorg.conf.new in /root that you can copy to /etc/X11/. If I remember right, been a while since I used Ubuntu, you can set root password from adminstration menu and then from grub, use one of the other ubuntu grub entries to boot straight into a terminal console without X.

dxqcanada · 11-01-2009, 08:02 AM

Sounds like you are running a very new version of Xserver ... that does not require an xorg.conf file.
In this case HAL takes care of detecting hardware.

Refer to this Ubuntu Configuration Doc

colorpurple21859 · 11-01-2009, 09:42 AM

the new xorg will not always detect hardware correctly, as for me where i need to run a max resolution of 1024x768 and xorg wants to set it to 1400xwhatever without a xorg.conf file

mrider · 11-01-2009, 01:57 PM

To dxqcanada:

Yeah, it's Kubuntu 9.10 - which does not have an xorg.conf. My basic problem was that I didn't know what to search for. As that article states, I need to make changes to an .fdi file. I have one now that I'm tweaking now, I don't yet know what I want the final settings to be. But I'm getting closer.

I started by creating an xorg.conf and editing it as I would ordinarily do. But that made things worse rather than better. The problem was that the settings I had in xorg.conf merged with the listed hardware rather than overwriting it. So I went from having one mouse driver that drove me crazy to having two mouse drivers that battled with each other, both of which drove me crazy.

So thanks everyone that helped, I think I'm on the road to solving this. It's just a matter of tweaking the FDI file until the mouse stops surprising me.

And sorry it took so long to get back with my response, I was offline trying different settings and tweaking stuff rather than sitting at the browser.

mrider · 11-01-2009, 05:14 PM

Here's my final resolution. I saved the following as /etc/hal/fdi/policy/appletouch.fdi:

Code:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<deviceinfo version="0.2">
  <device>
    <match key="info.capabilities" contains="input.touchpad">
      <match key="info.product" contains="appletouch">

        <merge key="input.x11_driver" type="string">synaptics</merge>
        <merge key="input.x11_options.SendCoreEvents" type="string">true</merge>
        <merge key="input.x11_options.SHMConfig" type="string">On</merge>

        <merge key="input.x11_options.HorizEdgeScroll" type="string">0</merge>
        <merge key="input.x11_options.HorizTwoFingerScroll" type="string">0</merge>
        <merge key="input.x11_options.HorizScrollDelta" type="string">0</merge>

        <merge key="input.x11_options.VertEdgeScroll" type="string">0</merge>
        <merge key="input.x11_options.VertTwoFingerScroll" type="string">0</merge>
        <merge key="input.x11_options.VertScrollDelta" type="string">0</merge>

        <merge key="input.x11_options.FingerLow" type="string">30</merge>
        <merge key="input.x11_options.FingerHigh" type="string">40</merge>
        <merge key="input.x11_options.PressureMotionMinZ" type="string">10</merge>

        <merge key="input.x11_options.TopEdge" type="string">50</merge>
        <merge key="input.x11_options.BottomEdge" type="string">300</merge>
        <merge key="input.x11_options.LeftEdge" type="string">100</merge>
        <merge key="input.x11_options.RightEdge" type="string">1100</merge>

        <merge key="input.x11_options.MinSpeed" type="string">0.15</merge>
        <merge key="input.x11_options.MaxSpeed" type="string">0.90</merge>
        <merge key="input.x11_options.AccelFactor" type="string">0.10</merge>

        <merge key="input.x11_options.MaxTapMove" type="string">100</merge>
        <merge key="input.x11_options.TapButton1" type="string">1</merge>
        <merge key="input.x11_options.TapButton2" type="string">3</merge>
        <merge key="input.x11_options.TapButton3" type="string">2</merge>
        <merge key="input.x11_options.ClickFinger1" type="string">1</merge>
        <merge key="input.x11_options.ClickFinger2" type="string">3</merge>
        <merge key="input.x11_options.ClickFinger3" type="string">2</merge>

        <merge key="input.x11_options.TouchpadOff" type="string">2</merge>
        <merge key="input.x11_options.PalmDetect" type="string">1</merge>

      </match>
    </match>
  </device>
</deviceinfo>

There are several points of interest.
1) "PalmDetect" doesn't seem to detect my palm. Which leads to #s 2 and 3.

2) I had to turn off horizontal and vertical edge scrolling. Whenever edge scrolling is on, if my hand is on the keyboard home row and the mouse is at the screen edge, the multi-desktop effect starts rotating around like I'm solving a Rubik's cube really fast.

3) I had to turn off two-finger scrolling for the same reason.

3) I might be able to solve #3 if I continue to tweak the values for FingerLow, FingerHigh, and PressureMotionMinZ. But I'm tired of fighting, so I just turned it off. That's okay, I don't use mouse gestures much anyway.

4) I have values for 1, 2, and 3 finger tapping and clicking. But I also have TouchpadOff set to 2, which turns that off.

So basically my mouse just points now. That's it. But if I'm mostly mousing around, I can issue the command synclient TouchpadOff=0 at a command prompt, and tapping comes to life.

Haven't quite figured out how to set the mouse to use alt+click as a right click like in OSx, but I imagine it's doable.

Anyway, FYI. And thanks for all the suggestions, they definitely pointed me in the right direction.