I recently tossed Fedora Core 3 in favor of SuSE 9.2 on my Compaq laptop. Everything works great except one thing: my touchpad.

I have my Synaptics touchpad, and an optical Logitech USB mouse plugged into the system. I use the USB mouse quite often when I'm "parked" for longer periods of time. In other instances, plugging it in is a bother, which is when my touchpad becomes a nuisance.

Fedora had actually detected it as a Synaptics touchpad, and installed the proper features. It worked great. SuSE detects only the USB mouse. I get generic ps/2 functionality out of the touchpad. I want the additional features like scrolling, tap-lock (whatever it is called... used when dragging items... so you don't have to hold the button in), etc. I also have a soft, plastic "wheel" of sorts just under the pad itself (more of a rocker) that acts as a mouse wheel. It worked in fedora, but not under SuSE.

I would like, if possible, to have full functionality out of my USB mouse and my touchpad if at all possible.

I compiled the synaptics touchpad driver (version 0.14) and added the following options to my xorg.conf file:

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Synaptics Mouse"
Identifier "Mouse0"
Driver "synaptics"
Option "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
Option "Protocol" "auto-dev"
Option "LeftEdge" "1700"
Option "RightEdge" "5300"
Option "TopEdge" "1700"
Option "BottomEdge" "4200"
Option "FingerLow" "25"
Option "FingerHigh" "30"
Option "MaxTapTime" "180"
Option "MaxTapMove" "220"
Option "VertScrollDelta" "100"
Option "MinSpeed" "0.09"
Option "MaxSpeed" "0.18"
Option "AccelFactor" "0.0015"
Option "SHMConfig" "on"
# Option "Repeater" "/dev/ps2mouse"
EndSection

cat /proc/bus/input/devices show both devices.

I tried using ltpconf to set the touchpad parameters, and it reports that SHMConfig is off. My X logs don't indicate any problems.

I'm a bit clueless here...

Any ideas?

You need to apply the alps.patch to your kernel source, and recompile the kernel. You also need the evdev module [CONFIG_INPUT_EVDEV]

This may help:
http://www1.uop.edu/~khughes/presario-r3120us/

Also you may like to know that there is a linux mailing list for the Compaq R3000 series (which I assume is what you have). You can find it here:
http://mail.kdewebdev.org/mailman/listinfo/linuxr3000

I'll tell you the truth...I have had so much grief trying to get that damn touchpad to work that I just gave up on it. I gleamed from somewhere that if you pass "i8042.nomux" on the kernel command line (ie: in grub.conf or lilo.conf) then the touchpad will work without alps and synaptics driver and includes _all_ functionality except for the scroll feature. Considering that the up and down arrows on the keyboard do the same thing as the scroll I felt that it was not woth fighting with this damn thing anymore.