Hello everyone. I upgraded recently to Karmic, and the settings in /etc/hal/fdi/policy/11-x11-synaptics.fdi are now being overridden by GNOME. I've been told in #gnome that it's probably the gnome-settings-daemon.

How can I get it to respect my .fdi settings? Thanks for any pointers.

Karmic shouldn't be expected to work right. If you want something that works, or that anyone knows how to get to work, the absolute latest version of something isn't the one to go with. You can try using gsynaptics to configure the touchpad, and the changes might stick. But more likely when you reboot, the changes made with gsynaptics will be gone. Since the fdi defs are fairly new, I would say you probably have a bug.

Unless you're a tester-wannabe like me . Indeed I'm curious about what's happening so it can be fixed before release.

I'd really like to understand who does what in what order; Xorg reads and understands the fdi file, so my guess is GNOME is reconfiguring all of the driver's settings. I can just use gsynaptics or put synclient in my .profile but I want to go beyond a workaround.

I wrote a little perl proggie that sits in place of an executable file, reports its arguments and parent process to syslog, and runs the original program via exec() as if nothing happened. This way I confirmed that /usr/bin/synclient is not being called, and the SHMconfig option is off because it's not needed since version 1.something. I just read about xinput, so that's my next target.

Yup, I'm filing a report when I have more info. Maybe it's a Wishlist item: "Don't reconfigure my touchpad" or "Add a textarea/grid for additional properties to the applet". I'm not ready to write the feature, yet.

I'm running FC11 x86_64 on a Lenovo Thinkpad T61. I hate the touchpad and, after some researching, found that the recommended way to turn it off was via GSynaptics. I was able to install GSynaptics without incident but, no matter how many times I set the touchpad to "Touchpad off", it gets turned back on after only a matter of seconds (no reboot, log off, or any other session interruption). I would rather not turn the touchpad off in the BIOS, does anyone have any suggestions on getting the GSynaptics "Touchpad off" setting to stick?

I'm stuck in the same rut. I am running Karmic release candidate and the touchpad is impossible to turn off. Every program that I launch re-enables the touch pad. This was NOT the case with the beta version. If I cannot get it turned off I'm giving up on Gnome until its cleared up.

I open to any and all suggestions. I'm considering cutting the wire at this point.

If you really want to disable the touchpad, all you have to do is "synclient TouchpadOff=1". Try it by hand first (the synclient program comes with the xserver-xorg-input-synaptics package). To do it automatically on login, add it to your .profile file:

I tried doing this but the behavior did not change. After a few seconds, the touchpad is activated again and doing synclient -l still shows TouchpadOff=1

Any other suggestions? FC11 x86_64/Lenovo T61