dell inspiron 1720 touchpad problem
 

Hi all ... I have installed opensuse 10.3 on my wifes i-1720 so far everything has worked great, The only thing I just can't figure out is getting the touchpad to scroll when using the sides. Its detected as a broadcom usb mouse any hints or suggestions are welcome ..

Thanks to all

I found ksynaptics the most useful tool for my touchpad. Once installed it shows up in KDE control centre. Might be worth a try assuming you're running KDE.

Thanks for the suggestion ... when I goto the ksynaptis module it states that there is no synaptics device found (not sure of exact wording) but I figured thats because the touchpad is seen as a usb mouse ... I'm gonna mess more with the xorg.conf file when I get home tonight...

I have a 1420 Inspiron. Same problem, cannot use the scroll sides.

Maybe it's too late, but i have also an i-1720 and my touchpad it's working well.

cat /proc/bus/input/devices:

It's a known problem of Dell's ALPS touchpads, here is my xorg.conf:

As you can see i've specified the vendor and the "SendCoreEvents" options, it's working like a charm on a gentoo box.
Hope it helps.

Dell Inspiron 1520 Synaptics touchpad - question
 

Question -- is there a resource available for describing the Options and their values used in your xorg.conf file? I've looked in the linux kernel code, and found a reference to "Synaptics TouchPad interfacing Guide" in the file drivers/input/mouse/synaptics.c. Unfortunately, I'm not much of a kernel hacker, although I feel comfortable in rebuilding/reinstalling kernels. I'm using Slackware 12.0.0 on a Inspiron 1520, and am going crazy w/ a hyper-sensitive touchpad that often send my cursor to another part of the document or even another window while I'm typing. I use a Kensington wireless mouse (much more efficient w/ mouse than touchpad...), so I could even deactivate the touchpad (if I could figure out how...). Of course, with my luck, the battery in my wireless mouse would run out (at the worst time, no less...). I called Dell support, and they had me download an updated Synaptics module, but this is only for Windoze... Windoze has the option of turning off the touchpad when it detects that there is a mouse, and turning it back on when it senses that the mouse is no longer active. (Pretty cool...) I almost never boot into Windoze -- I'm a developer that works almost exclusively under Linux.

Anyway, forgive me for rambling. Getting back to the question: where can I find a description of the Options and their values?

Thanks in advance.

wrobertz: Welcome to LQ!
You can look at your synaptics driver settings using 'synclient', a command line application.
'synclient -l' will list your current settings.
You can also manipulate your settings using synclient, and then make your changes permanent by adding them to your xorg.conf. 'man synclient' for further information.

Wow searching this problem again only with a different distro, it brought me back to my post and your reply which I didn't see until now ... I now have installed Sabayon (for the last year now) which is gentoo based ... have you switched to xorg 7.4?? If so is your touchpad still working? Have you edited the /etc/hal/fdi/policy files?? Are there still settings in your xorg.conf for your touchpad?? Also the only difference I saw between the device listing is that my alps is listed as mouse2 where yours was/is mouse1 ... any info would be great ... thanks