Weird synaptic problem

josefin · 07-31-2007, 07:55 AM

I've got a little problem with the touchpad on my macbook (running slackware 12): if I use the synaptics driver I can't use the single finger tap or single finger scroll. But I can use two finger tap, two finger scroll and three finger tap just fine, as well as the mouse button.

I don't think the touchpad is broken; if I comment out the whole synaptics section in my xorg.conf, so it defaults to the appletouch driver, single tap works just fine (and it is fine in OSX). This solution isn't good because the appletouch driver doesn't support scrolling, two finger tapping etc...

I did discover a partial workaround: with the synaptics driver, if I set the option "LTCornerButton" to "1", it sets single finger tap to left click. But this doesn't help with the single finger scrolling. I'm wondering if this is some kind of button mapping error, but I had no success using xmodmap to change the mappings.

I've tested with Fedora 7, and everything works perfectly with the synaptics driver, so it seems this is a Slackware problem. I've tried running Slackware with the 2.6.21.5 kernel that comes with it, and I've also tried various configurations of the 2.6.22 kernel with no success.

Another odd thing, only the latest synaptics driver (0.14.6) does anything at all, any earlier version is not loaded.

This is the section from my xorg.conf file:

Code:

Section "InputDevice"
  Identifier    "Synaptics Mouse"
  Driver        "synaptics"
  Option        "Device"        "/dev/psaux"
  Option        "Protocol"      "auto-dev"
  Option        "SendCoreEvents"        "true"
  Option        "LeftEdge"      "1700"
  Option        "RightEdge"     "5300"
  Option        "TopEdge"       "1700"
  Option        "BottomEdge"    "4200"
  Option        "FingerLow"     "25"
  Option        "FingerHigh"    "30"
  Option        "MaxTapTime"    "180"
  Option        "MaxDoubleTapTime" "1"
  Option        "MaxTapMove"    "220"
  Option        "HorizScrollDelta" "40"
  Option        "VertScrollDelta" "40"
  Option        "MinSpeed"      "0.6"
  Option        "MaxSpeed"      "1.0"
  Option        "AccelFactor"   "0.05"
  Option        "LTCornerButton" "0"
  Option        "LBCornerButton" "0"
  Option        "RTCornerButton" "0"
  Option        "RBCornerButton" "0"
  Option        "EdgeMotionMinSpeed" "0"
  Option        "EdgeMotionMaxSpeed" "0"
  Option        "EdgeMotionUseAlways" "0"
  Option        "HorizEdgeScroll" "0"
  Option        "VertEdgeScroll" "0"
  Option        "HorizTwoFingerScroll" "1"
  Option        "VertTwoFingerScroll" "1"
  Option        "PalmDetect"    "0"
  Option        "TapButton1"    "1"
  Option        "TapButton2"    "3"
  Option        "TapButton3"    "2"
#  Option       "TouchpadOff"   "1"
  Option        "SHMConfig"     "on"
#  Option       "Repeater"      "/dev/ps2mouse"
EndSection

Does anyone have any ideas on how to fix this?

BCarey · 07-31-2007, 12:46 PM

Did you compare the relevant entries in xorg.conf from Fedora to the one in Slack?

Brian

josefin · 08-01-2007, 03:20 AM

Hey, thanks for the advice. I had compared the xorg.conf files, and I hadn't seen anything wrong, so I'd dismissed that.

But since you suggested it, I looked at them again, still didn't find anything wrong, but this time I tried replacing the whole synaptics section in my slackware xorg.conf with the same section from the Fedora xorg.conf

And somehow, it's working just fine now. I still don't know what exactly was wrong, but I'll do a few tests to find out.

Josefin

josefin · 08-01-2007, 03:59 AM

Okay, I found what was wrong with my xorg.conf file. In the non-working file, I was using these values:

Code:

  Option        "LeftEdge"      "1700"
  Option        "RightEdge"     "5300"
  Option        "TopEdge"       "1700"
  Option        "BottomEdge"    "4200"

In the file I was using on Fedora, I had these values:

Code:

    Option          "LeftEdge"              "100"
    Option          "RightEdge"             "1120"
    Option          "TopEdge"               "50"
    Option          "BottomEdge"            "310"

So for some reason, setting the edge options too high disables single finger tapping.

Josefin