Synaptics touchpad on FC4?

sancho · 10-24-2005, 09:08 AM

Has anyone been able to get their Synaptics touchpad to work with the synaptics driver on Fedora (Core 4 or otherwise)? I'm not just talking about "does it work"--mine works by default, but that's with the PS/2 mouse compatability mode. It's super-sensitive with that and a PITA to use.

I have installed the "synaptics*.rpm" included with the distro, followed the instructions in the INSTALL/README files included, but ultimately X will not start. It fails with an error saying that it cannot find the hardware.

Anyone seen this before? Tips?

Thanks

con · 10-25-2005, 10:35 AM

just taking a wild guess here but... is the evdev module loaded or compiled into the kernel? The synaptics driver needs it, if it isnt there X wont start. I had that problem with mandriva.

sancho · 10-25-2005, 01:37 PM

Yeah, I read in the docs that it required evdev. There is no module called 'evdev' on my default install, and I'm not sure if it's compiled into the stock FC4 kernels. Anyone know?

con · 10-26-2005, 04:39 AM

try 'modprobe evdev' before starting x

sancho · 10-26-2005, 02:13 PM

Can't 'modprobe evdev' if the module isn't there...

Code:

[root@rambus ~]# modprobe evdev
FATAL: Module evdev not found.

con · 10-26-2005, 03:53 PM

ok sorry... one thing you could do is go into /usr/src/linux and do make xconfig. look up evdev and enable it as a module. save and do make, make modules_install and depmod -a. and then modprobe evdev (thats what i did on slack 10.2)...but you might want to get an second opinion on that if you think it sounds too complicated, but it should be pretty safe. anyone else got any ideas?

con · 10-26-2005, 04:12 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by con
ok sorry... one thing you could do is go into /usr/src/linux and do make xconfig. look up evdev and enable it as a module. save and do make, make modules_install and depmod -a. and then modprobe evdev (thats what i did on slack 10.2)...but you might want to get an second opinion on that if you think it sounds too complicated, but it should be pretty safe. anyone else got any ideas?

...unless it isnt already compiled into the kernel as it seems to be on earlier releases of fedora core. check this thread http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...hreadid=182046 it might help. I really hope Im not just wasting your time. I havent used fedora since me and a friend gave a linux crash course/introduction at school...wich was a total disaster..only 4 or 5 computers booted out of about 15...think it was fedora core 3 we had the other students install...the problems were probably because almost everyone had made their partitions with DOS fdisk, like our teacher told us/them to do.

sancho · 10-27-2005, 09:25 PM

No need to apologize; I appreciate you taking the time in the first place.

As for compiling evdev as a module, that makes perfect sense. I didn't want to go pulling the kernel source out if I didn't have to, but it's looking like that might be unavoidable. I'll give it a try this weekend.

Thanks for the link, too.