Touchpad misbehaviour on toshiba satellite

trebek · 02-06-2006, 11:31 PM

Hey everyone. I own a toshiba satellite and i've upgraded my linux distro FC3 with yum, normally as i've always done it. The problem i noticed after doing this is that now i can't use my touchpad as a regular mouse. I used to be able to drag and drop, select several items by only tapping twice and holding my finger over the touchpad, without the need of ever using the two buttons under the touchpad. How can i fix this? I googled my problem and so far the only answer has been to use some kind of driver, but this doesn't make any sense since it was working before with an older version of my kernel. My new kernel version is now: 2.6.12-1.1381_FC3smp.

Any ideas or direct help would be very much appreciated since i've been dealing with this problem for 4 months now and i haven't been able to fix it.

accessrichard · 02-08-2006, 03:40 PM

If you are using a synaptics touchpad, then I would check out synclient

$man synclient

trebek · 02-11-2006, 01:55 PM

How can i tell if i am using a synaptics touchpad?

accessrichard · 02-11-2006, 03:13 PM

Not sure the "real" way, however FC usually knows if you are using a synaptics touchpad, provided you did not use fglrxconfig to create your xorg.conf file you would see

driver synaptics

specified in your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file under InputDevices

or you can go to your notebook manufacture website

amosbatto · 02-14-2006, 12:01 AM

I installed the synaptics driver on my laptop and wrote up instructions a couple months ago. It might be helpful:
http://mypage.iu.edu/~abatto/essays/...paq-v2410.html

--amos

sandbergc9 · 02-20-2006, 11:01 PM

My dell L400 uses a synaptics touchpad. After installing FC4, the touchpad was OK for applications, however whenever browsing the touchpad was an uncontrollable joy pad of hell! I had to be very careful or the browser would rapidly bounce from location to location in my history list.

Finally after reading the above solution, I can browse with pleasure in Linux. Thanks

trebek · 12-10-2006, 12:56 AM

Well, glad to hear it can be done on FC4. Fact is, i am now using kubuntu on my laptop and it never gave me any problems with the touchpad. It's actually quite good. I also put a small USB mouse because it's a little bit faster, works like a charm. Thanks, you helped a lot dudes.