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Having trouble installing a piece of hardware? Want to know if that peripheral is compatible with Linux?
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I have rheumatoid arthritis and was looking for a keyboard that will work with my clumsy arthritic hands, and settled with an IBM Model M that I love. I'm still fighting the mices for a good pointing. The Microsoft Elite Wireless put a lot of stress on my wrist, so when it died I got a Microsoft Natural Laser 6000. Nice mouse, easier on the wrist and fingers, but no matter how I change the settings I can't get fine movement. I have a new Logitech Marble mouse that is nice, but no scroll bar and I use that feature a lot. I can't use the Synaptics driver with my Adesso stand-alone touchpad, and the tapping is far too light for me if I leave it set to the default PS/2 or IMS/2 settings in xorg.conf. I'm at a loss as to what to try next, I know the problem can be solved.
Any ideas? I know there are a couple of odd designs out there like the vertical mouse, but I don't know if that would help. The best so far has been the touchpad, if I could just turn off the tapping. Another solution would be to use the trackball on the right, if I can find one of the scrollbar (only) that once were sold to clip to a laptop.
There are usually ways to turn off or disable tapping on your touchpad if that's what you want to do. Please post your distro and your xorg.conf file and I'll try and help with that. It's usually just a matter of editing xorg.conf.
As for hardware, I see many recommending trackballs but that is such a personal choice depending on your specific disabilities that it would be hard to give meaningful advice. The best thing to do is go out to a computer store and physically try out whatever they have available. It's really the only way to know.
Also, a note on mice and precision, not sure if this will help you, but if you get a laser mouse with a high DPI, something like 2000 dpi or so, you will get super precision, really great for playing games. I have one here where you can change DPI on the fly, quite nice (I can pick between 800, 1200, and 2000, but 2000 is way to much for me, 1200 works best). I know you probably don't play too many video games, but you did complain about 'fine movement' or precision, and this for sure will help.
Last edited by H_TeXMeX_H; 02-26-2008 at 01:28 PM.
There are usually ways to turn off or disable tapping on your touchpad if that's what you want to do. Please post your distro and your xorg.conf file and I'll try and help with that. It's usually just a matter of editing xorg.conf.
Thank you! I had played with the xorg.conf file trying to get a trackball working and it was messy with commented-out lines, so I used Xorg -configure to generate a new one. It works the same as the messy one.
Right now I am using a Microsoft Natural Laser Mouse 6000 via USB as the main mouse (haven't tried to configure the extra buttons as I don't use them), and an Adesso Model GP-160PS touchpad. Here's the results from "egrep "Name|Handlers" /proc/bus/input/devices" -
I'm guessing I need to add a section for "Mouse1" for the touchpad in order to configure it, but I haven't been able to find information on the settings to turn off the tapping feature.
I tried the Synaptics driver, but SHMconfig won't start because my touchpad is an Adesso, not a Synaptics. I emailed Adesso and got a "we don't support Linux" reply, emailed Synaptics to see if they make a stand-alone unit and received no reply at all.
Nearly forgot, I'm using the i686 version of Arch Linux and update every day or two.
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