I'm having a very hard time getting my macbook 5,1 touchpad to work in X11.

I installed slackware 13 64 and installed the x collection (but no KDE) and I seem to have the relevant drivers. There is an appletouch kernel module that didn't seem to be being loaded, and I put synaptics in the modules section of my xorg.conf and added a section for it.

I think the problem is that the touchpad isn't being recognised at all - my Xorg.log.0 shows syanptics loading but not finding any touchpad ("no event device found"), and if I look at my event devices there is nothing listed for the touchpad, but the keyboard,iSight,lid etc are all there. I noticed that after synaptics fails to load, evdev then goes through the devices that are there and configures my keyboard, and complains about not knowing what to do with applesmc.

I have tried loading the appletouch kernel module at startup but this doesnt seem to help.

Since the problem seems to be a bit deeper than just configuring X, I'm not sure what to do next.

Is there some other kernel module I need to make this work?

How can I find out why I have no /dev/input/event* for my touchpad?

Have you tried running xinput?
Eeven though I am no longer a member there, there is a tutorial at forums.debian.net which helps you to setup a synaptics touchpad. It may be of some use.
There are also two tutorials on using mpx.

thanks - I wasn't seeing anything in xinput but searching the debian wiki and following some links I found this:

http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=66397

it seems I need the bcm5974-dkms kernel module to get it to work properly... hopefully that should sort it out.