Synaptics touchpad not recognised by synaptics driver (12.1)
 

Slack 12.1. I have a synaptics touchpad on a Lenovo 3000 N200 laptop. /proc/bus/input/devices tells me all about it including that its handler is mouse1, event 8. I managed to build and install a synpatics driver using the information provided by rworkman in the very helpful post at
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...rg-7.3-592525/

X loads the synaptics module but then reports in the Xorg.log file:
"no synaptics event device found (checked 19 nodes)". I guess that I have to make explicit in the xorg.conf file which device it should be reading from - I know that /dev/input/mouse1 produces data when I touch the touchpad but I not sure how I tie that into the xorg.conf file. Any help appreciated.

Try taking a look at the output of "xev". I have a synaptics touchpad but never use it, but I've considered using it as a secondary input to send different events than my usb mouse. Anyway, I did not take a look at the link you posted, but I believe you should be able to get it working with some configuration of xorg.conf.

I had a lot of trouble getting mine to work as well, and got it going with a combination of using the Synaptics Slackbuild at slacky.eu and messing with my xorg.conf. Here are the relevant excerpts:

Of course you also have to load the synaptics module in the Module section.

Thanks for the xorg.conf extracts and the url to the Slackbuild for the synaptics driver. I have tried again with the driver installed from this build and with xorg.conf based on your example, but still no joy - the synaptics driver still cannot find a synaptics device. The result is an X session with a mouse cursor but no movement when I try and move it with the Touchpad.

I see that in your xorg.conf server Layout section you have both a Touchpad device (Corepointer) defined and a Mouse0 device (AlwaysCore). Can you show us what the Mouse0 Input Device section looks like? I have tried xorg.conf both with a "regular" mouse and without (and also trying same and different devices for the two) but always without success. Perhaps there is something I need to know about the Mouse0 configuration for this to work ?

I don't know if it helps much since it is pretty simple, but here it is:

Is your touchpad recognized by the system?
What is the output from ?

If not: change the line /sbin/modprobe psmouse proto=impsinto /sbin/modprobe psmousein the file /etc/rc.d/rc.modules, then reboot.

Worked for me with Slack 12.0

Greetings
eddyvp

This is no longer correct in 12.1. In 12.0, the psmouse module was blacklisted in /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist and subsequently loaded in /etc/rc.d/rc.modules*, so your solution was correct. Now, however, the psmouse is NOT blacklisted and instead of being loaded from rc.modules*, it is just automatically loaded with the options given in /etc/modprobe.d/psmouse. Therefore, you should just edit /etc/modprobe.d/psmouse and change the options there instead. I don't know that it will help your problem, but if you do try that solution be sure that you do it correctly according to Slackware 12.1 and not 12.0.

Thanks to everybody who replied to this post - all is OK now.

I had commented out the command:
"modprobe psmouse proto=imps"
from the /etc/modprobe.d/psmouse file. I had not modified the similar line in the /etc/rc.d/rc.modules file. Once I had done this, the synaptics driver worked OK and the synclient programme also works to modify the options during an X session. Wow.

I want to update what I had posted earlier, because it turned out I had made a pretty substantial mistake in the xorg.conf I posted. Using the xorg.conf I posted, it turns out that while the synaptics touchpad worked fine, no other mice worked at all. Since I use the touchpad most of the time, I simply hadn't noticed it. However, when I tried to fix the problem, it turns out that I could only get one mouse working at a time, and that was the mouse that was declared "CorePointer" in the ServerLayout section. Any mouse declared to be "AlwaysCore" didn't work.

Well, it turns out that in Xorg 7.3, the "AlwaysCore" directive has been removed, so any device declared to be AlwaysCore, didn't work. The fix I found is the "SendCoreEvents directive:

I also modified the InputDevice section for the touchpad to include this:

So the whole thing now looks like this:

Now multiple mice seem to coexist quite nicely

Hi there,

I am running an ACER 5050 with slack 12.1 now, thanks to this posting synaptics works like a charm ......

{smile}

This thread was immensely helpful for me as well. I feel obligated, though, to point out how my own stupidity got in the way: when editing /etc/modprobe.d/psmouse, vim created a backup file (/etc/modprobe.d/psmouse~) which needed to be deleted. Of course, I forgot to delete this, so the imps option was continuing to be passed. Thanks especially to Hangdog42 for this!

I just wondered why it did work for me all the time without changing that file, and quickly found the reason which might be suboptimal :)
I use (for various reasons) a self-compiled kernel-image. I remember having had problems with the mouse in general in early 2.6 kernels and solved that by compiling psmouse directly into the kernel (not as a module). It did work fine afterwards. Interestingly I totally forgot about this over time and never changed it back...

Thanks to this thread I finally made the vertical scrolling work on my Acer Aspire 2920.

Hi there!
Thanks for the info in this thread!!
I managed to make work the synaptics touch pad on a couple of laptops with slackware 12.2
I changed:
options psmouse proto=auto
In the
/etc/modprobe.d/psmouse
file.
And yes, rembermer to delete the psmouse~ file after editing like josiah says.

Thanks again to all !!