Glidepoint & The Synaptics Driver.
 

I have a old, but sill very serviceable ALPS keyboard with a built-in Cirque Glidepoint touchpad. Apparently the Synaptics driver will work with this touchpad, but does anyone know if that means the "Tap" feature will work?

if so, how does one install the Synaptics driver? Just change the name of the mouse/input driver in the xorg.conf?

Many Thanks.
:hattip:

With my ALPS Glidepoint touchpad I use the custom /etc/hal/fdi/policy/11-x11-synaptics.fdi shown in this post.
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...2/#post3665348
HAL automaticaly takes care of setting everything up. I have no mouse or touchpad settings in my /etc/X11/xorg.conf.

Well, I copied and pasted your script to a text editor, saved it as, 11-x11-synaptics.fdi, moved it to etc/hal/fdi/policy/ and rebooted. Unfortunately nothing has changed. It didn't make one bit of difference. I must be doing something wrong. Wouldn't be the first time. :)

As a follow up I've gone into the xorg.conf file and commented out all references to the mouse and restarted the x-server, but the touchpad is still working as if it were a PS/2 mouse, i.e., no tap function, etc.

Well, i've spent the last couple of hours trying various things with the 11-x11-synaptics.fdi file and the xorg.conf file and nothing has changed. Every thing i've tried has been completely ignored and the touchpad continues to function, but without the tap feature.

Bump.
:hattip:

On this laptop this command ' find /sys/devices/platform/i8042 -name "name" -print -exec cat {} \; '
produces this output.
If you run the command do you see an entry for the touchpad?
If not, then the kernel is not recognising the touchpad. You may have to look at BIOS settings or kernel options.

This is all that comes back after entering that command:

/sys/devices/platform/i8042/serio1/input/input5/name
PS/2 Generic Mouse

I'm using the huge kernel so I'll check the BIOS, but would be surprised the BIOS has anything to do with it.

Just ran through the various BIOS settings and that has nothing to do with it so it must be the kernel. Is there a command one can run to load the Synaptics driver (module) and, perhaps put into rc.local so it loads on boot up?
Many Thanks.
:hattip:

From http://www.cirque.com/desktoptouchpa...questions.aspx
I think you may be SOL with this.

You shouldn't need to reboot - do a /etc/rc.d/rc.hald reload and restart X

Strange if it is unsupported. That would usually mean some special windows drivers only. Whether synaptics works with it I couldn't say.