Making Synaptics Touchpad Work Properly

masonm · 10-07-2007, 08:13 AM

Have you installed the Synaptics Xorg driver, edited your xorg.conf, and Slack's kernel still detects your touchpad as a PS/2 mouse so you can't use the advanced features of your touchpad?

If in dmesg you see the touchpad referred to as a PS/2 Synaptics Touchpad instead of a SynPS/2 Synaptics touchpad, that's what has happened. There is a fix though, and as is usual for Slack, it's actually quite simple.

Assuming that you have in fact done the above and the driver and a proper xorg.conf is in place you just need to edit a couple of files and it should be properly detected.

Edit your rc.modules file. Find the lines that load psmouse and comment them out. Find the line that loads evdev and uncomment it. Save the file.

Edit rc.local and add /sbin/modprobe/psmouse and save the file.

This will cause everything else to be loaded before the mouse driver and now your touchpad should be properly detected so that the Synaptics Xorg driver will actually work.

truthfatal · 10-08-2007, 05:00 PM

Well posted, I'd considered making a write up but I've been distracted for the last few weeks.
I have

Code:

if [[ 'lsmod | cut -f 1 -d " " | grep psmouse' ]] ; then
        echo "Found psmouse module"
        echo "Reloading psmose module so that Synapics will work"
        /sbin/rmmod psmouse
        /sbin/insmod /lib/modules/2.6.21.5-smp/kernel/drivers/input/mouse/psmouse.ko
fi

in my rc.local and that has my synaptics pad working fine. just because I get an error when I try to use modprobe (purely asthetic)

xflow7 · 10-08-2007, 07:49 PM

Another approach that worked for me was to leave rc.modules untouched and just create a file in /etc/modules.d called touchpad with the line:

Code:

options psmouse proto=any

This over-rides the proto=imps option which appears in rc.modules and was the cause of the Synaptics touchpad not being properly recognized.

BCarey · 10-08-2007, 10:18 PM

TIMTOWTDI

You can also just remove the proto=imps bit from rc.modules.

Brian

truthfatal · 10-08-2007, 11:24 PM

It took me a minute to figure out what TIMTOWTDI means, but yeas, apparently there is a few ways.

some more simple than others.

masonm · 10-09-2007, 10:07 AM

Yep, as with most things there is indeed more than one way of doing it. What I posted here is the one that I used and what worked for me. Like truthfatal, I'd been meaning to write this for a while now and just hadn't got around to doing it.

akshunj · 06-23-2009, 09:23 PM

Two years since the original thread, and the info is STILL locate-able and relevant.

--Akshun J