My laptop's hard drive just recently died in horrific ways. Since my installation of Debia Linux on my desktop computer has been going so well, I decided to install Debian on the laptop rather than going through the tedious process of installing WinXP from the five restore CDs and then removing all of that kruft that I never want but gets installed anyway.
Everything seems to be fine with one exception: the mouse. The HP Pavillion ze5300 series uses a Synaptics Touchpad PS/2 mouse and I'm not entirely sure how to get it working. It's definitely not functioning, since the X server "failed to initialize core devices" and died. I found something that claims to be a Linux Synaptics Touchpad driver (
http://web.telia.com/~u89404340/touchpad/) and downloaded the latest version (0.14.4) but I can't seem to get it to compile under my 2.6.14.6 kernel. Upon request, I can list the result from the make process, but it's very long.
I did notice, however, that it complained about not being able to find an XFree86 header. The INSTALL file claimed that it didn't need the headers under XFree86 4.3 (which I have) but I downloaded the XFree86 source anyway in case that woul]d make a difference. It didn't.
The Gentoo Linux Wiki (
http://gentoo-wiki.com/HARDWARE_Synaptics_Touchpad) states that the Synaptics Touchpad driver isn't strictly necessary to get the touchpad working, just to access the cute special features. Is this true? The only thing I require from the touchpad is that it works and that I can turn it off, since an external USB mouse is usually connected to this laptop anyway. However, the mouse does not appear to be working whatsoever; catting /dev/input/mice spits out an error: "No such device."
Nonetheless, dmesg reports
Code:
Synaptics Touchpad, model: 1, fw: 5.8, id: 0x2348b3, caps: 0x904713/0x10008
input: SynPS/2 Synaoptics TouchPad on isa0060/serio1
Does anyone have any clue what's going on? The touchpad isn't working, I know that much... but since dmesg sees it and /dev/input/mice doesn't, I'm at a loss.
Thanks for reading through.
Cheers!
EDIT:
Oh, by the way... Knoppix v4.0.2 works just fine, mouse and all.