Synaptics touchpad/Mandrake 10

I have a synaptics touchpad with a seperate designated scroll section. Currently I am using the universal PS/2 USB mode under Mandrake 10. My question consists of 2 parts.

1. Is there a way to get the scroll section working?

2. How do I get tap-clicking working under Gnome 2.4?

I would preer to get the tap-clicking working first. I am a complete newbie(just installe mandrake 10about a week ago). I'm also a sophmore in high school, so I don't understand everything about computers. The computer I am running Mandrake on is a Dual-Boot Compaq Presario 2104 US laptop.

Go here, and follow the instructions step by step, and youre good to go.

http://baudot.com/articles/touchpad.php

When I installed Mandrake 10, I got three or four different choices on the Lilo startup. One of them was the enterprise version.

My touchpad (on an HP pavilion zd7000 laptop) worked only in generic mode under the main "linux" startup. However, in the "linux-enterprise" startup, the touchpad worked well, both as to "tapping" and as to the "scrolling" portion of the touchpad. My point being -- somewhere in mandrake are the tools to properly identify and setup the synaptics mouse, since it is done automatically with the "enterprise" kernel.

So, why am I browsing here looking for touchpad info? Well, I could not get Mandrake 10 to run stable on my laptop, so I switched to SuSE.

Touchpad does not have the synaptics portions working correctly. I took a look at the prior reference to install the synaptics drivers the hard way, but I'm not certain my SuSE install has all of the necessary sources installed to go through the "make" and "make install" process.

So, I will be looking further ...

it looks to me like, the link provided above provides the same thing i'm going to post, except a newer version.

i'm using the version from here -> http://tuxmobil.org/touchpad_driver.html

it's an older version, but it works perfectly for my synaptics touchpad on a dell inspiron 8100.

it looks like the newer version may not work like the older versions do to some changes in how things are done. for instance the faq has a question/answer:

Why did tap-to-click stop working after I upgraded from an old version? Time is now measured in milliseconds instead of "number of packets". In practice, this means that if you are upgrading from an old version, you need to change MaxTapTime and EmulateMidButtonTime to make "tap to click" work. Good values are 180 and 75 respectively.

i guess try the older version from the link i posted and follow the instructions. it should work fine if your touchpad is a synaptics touchpad. i've got all my tap zones, vertical and horizontal scrolling working peachy.

edit: also, there should already be a precompiled binary that you just copy and paste to the right directory so there's no compiling necessary. just copy and paste the binary to the right place and edit your X configuration file. the editing of your X configuration file can be a little confusing. but to have the touchpad (this version) working with the mouse plugged in (or not plugged in) you'll have to have one of the devices set as the core pointer and the other to send events in the server layout section. although, you may need to do some experimentation or contact the developer as i'm using a usb optical mouse and i don't know how the configuration would work with a ps/2 mouse. the developer did personally answer questions i emailed him regarding configuration of the touchpad driver, though.

any hoo, here's the relevent sections from my X configuration file.

Section "ServerLayout"
        Identifier     "Anaconda Configured"
        Screen      0  "Screen0" 0 0
        InputDevice    "Mouse0" "SendCoreEvents"
	InputDevice    "Mouse[1]" "CorePointer"
        InputDevice    "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
	Identifier	"Mouse0"
	# Modified by mouseconfig
	Driver		"mouse"
	Option		"Device"		"/dev/mouse"
	Option		"Protocol"		"IMPS/2"
	Option		"Emulate3Buttons"	"no"
	Option		"ZAxisMapping"		"4 5"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
  Driver  	"synaptics"
  Identifier  	"Mouse[1]"
  Option 	"Device"  	"/dev/psaux"
  Option	"Edges"		"1900 5400 1800 3900"
  Option	"Finger"	"25 30"
  Option	"MaxTapTime" "20"
  Option	"MaxTapMove" "220"
  Option	"VertScrollDelta" "100"
  Option	"MinSpeed"	"0.02"
  Option	"MaxSpeed"	"0.18"
  Option	"AccelFactor" "0.0010"
#  Option	"Repeater"	"/dev/ps2mouse"
#  Option	"SHMConfig"	"on"
EndSection

in the server layout, i have my usb mouse ( device is mouse0 ) option set as SendCoreEvents and the touchpad ( device is mouse[1] ) option set as CorePointer.

good luck.

i am very happy now!!!

i had asked this problem in other forums before and had no reply

i knew it was a 2.6 kernel issue and had followed a few tutorial/fixes but none had worked before.

this one
http://baudot.com/articles/touchpad.php

sorted me out perfectly!!

regards

BoX_l