Touchpad Help
 

I have a Dell Latitude X1 which is basically a Samsung Q30 laptop however I can't stand using it because when typing, I always tap the touch pad which moves the cursor somewhere else - it is beyond frustrating. Is there a way I can disable the tap function on the touch pad? I don't want to disable the mouse scroll on the touch pad at all, just the touch to tap feature.

is the touchpad a synaptics touchpad? in this case, you can enable/disable the touchpad, configure scroll area on the side, and, and, and...
(search for synaptics driver linux on your favorite goo^H^H^H search engine)

The only way that I could get the touchpad taps to disable was to recompile my kernel with the synaptics patch, along with using the xorg synaptics driver. Then you can edit your xorg.conf to disable it.

I had tried just using the xorg synaptics driver and configuring it in the xorg.conf but the taps would never disable. It was only after applying the touchpad patch to the kernel and recompiling that I was able to finally disable it.

That sucks. It appears to be way to complicated. I don't want to completely disable the synaptic touchpad, just the tap to touch feature is driving me crazy.

I fixed this for my synaptics touchpad by editing /etc/X11/xorg.conf.
and setting "MaxTapTime" to 0.

here's a good link
http://gentoo-wiki.com/HARDWARE_Synaptics_Touchpad

So I don't need to recompile a kernel and do all that crazy jazz, right?

It depends really. You do need to have the synaptics xorg driver, but may or may not need to patch your kernel.

I was simply relating what I needed to do to disable the taps on my Dell. I'd try the xorg driver first and edit the xorg.conf and see if that does it for you. If it doesn't, you'll have to patch the kernel. It really isn't as complicated as it sounds LOL

So it sounds like the 1st thing I need to do is verify if I have the XORG driver installed, right? I mean my touch pad is working so does that mean I have the xorg driver or could I be using a generic driver? Is there a way to verify this?

If you are using debian - maybe this will help
http://www.debuntu.org/2006/06/18/67...complete-guide

This looks like a pretty complete guide, so I hope it helps.

No, just because the touchpad is working doesn't mean you have the synaptics xorg driver. It will function without it, using just a standard PS/2 driver, but you can't configure any of the features.

Knowing Debian's aversion to proprietary drivers I doubt that you have it installed. Just check your xorg.conf to see if there is an entry for the touchpad and what (if any) driver is listed.

I found this in my xorg.conf

Is this not what I need?

It is, simply add the lines you need, for example
Option "MaxTapTime" "0"

you can find more options in /usr/share/doc/xfree-driver-synaptics (or was is xorg-driver-synaptics, I'm sure you can find it out...)
In that directory you will find a file which contains a list of all possible options. (sorry, currently not on linux, so cant check the exact path and name)

When you enable SHM Mode (check the appropriate option line, something with SHM) you can use the synclient application (apt-get install synclient) to tweak and show all the option settings, when you're happy about them just don't forget to copy your values into the xorg.con option lines...

So I edited the XORG.conf and made the following line:

Now I don't follow everything else you mentioned about SHM and more options in the path you attempted to note...

SHMConfig will let you use other programs to edit settings rather than manually editing xorg.conf all the time.

as doc.nice suggested "apt-get install synclient" and you can change parameters with synclient

ok, there is an option that enables SHM Mode, that means you can manipulate the shared memory where the config settings are stored by user programes, like synclient. This application can show and manipulate all configuration options for the synaptics driver (e.g. cursor speed, scrollbars, sensitivity and lots more).
I just saw that synclient comes with the xorg driver in the package "xserver-xorg-input-synaptics".

You can see the names of the options in the readme file or using synclient (see man synclient for more).