First off, hello. I've been reading posts from this board for a few days now and have already been able to help myself on this "journey" of installing linux.

I'm running a dual boot Windows XP and Fedora on a Dell Latitude X300. Install was perfect and overall things are great.

Now, I'm running into some issues here and there. The current one has me perplexed simply because I don't know Linux. My knowledge is from the DOS days and Windows.

At work I dock the laptop into the docking station which has a USB Logitech MX700 mouse attached to it. It works perfectly (hence the ability to post this thread!) The problem is when the mouse is not connected, the touchapd doesn't work.

Basic question is: how do get Linux to recognize the touchpad mouse as a valid mouse input?

Any help would be appreciated and thank you in advance.

sounds like your touchpad is not configured for X

try adding a section like this to your /etc/X11/XF86Config-4

The last option is optional - if you don't want the Emulate3Buttons-Option (emulates a middle button click, when pressing both buttons) just leave it out or set it to false. /dev/psaux might be different on your system - never used fedora, so i can't tell ya.

And you need to add the following line to the "ServerLayout" section in your XF86Config-4 file:

save the file and restart X!

if X does not start any more after that, some of this information is wrong ;) (i surely don't hope so! it won't damage anything though). try to hack around yourself (by pressing ctrl-alt-f1 or ctrl-alt-f2 you should come to a terminal login), or paste the output of the 'dmesg'-command in here. simply removing the line in the ServerLayout section should make it work again.