Sad to report that I have had to ditch Slackware on my new laptop and have
turned to Arch to get a system whcih I find usable. The problem which I was
not able to solve using Slackware64-current was getting a functional driver
for the rather horrid trackpad supplied with the laptpop (Thinkpad L450). This
is one of those devices where you have a IBM trackpoint (small red button on
the keyboard with three buttons below the keyboard) and additioinally a
touchpad but with no associated buttons - instead the pad itself can be pushed
to click near its bottom edge and can be further configured so that clicks on
the left/right of the pad can be interpreted as left/right buttons. The
touchpad, as far as I am concerned, can be totally disabled on boot-up. The
trackpoint is fine for all my needs - but the buttons have to work with the
trackpoint. I could not get this to work with the slackware drivers. I started
a thread on LQ
(http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...ad-4175546192/)
but did not manage to resolve the issues.

As far as I can make out two drivers have to work properly for this hardware to perform. These are the synaptics driver and the evdev driver. Once you have these up and running there are various configuration options which can be set either through xorg.conf or using utilities such as synclient and xinput. However I was never able to get any configuration in which the middle button was recognised to even exist nor where the drag operation could be made to work for both left and right buttons.

The Arch wiki made mention of patches that were required to the evdev and synaptics drivers and I tried to find the relevant source in my Slackware installation but it was obvious that the Arch patches were not patching the sources that I had. So I created another partition and installed Arch. I found that I had fully functional left and right buttons (including drag operations) in X and it was an easy configuration step to get the middle button wokring.

Seems like a small issue over which to drop my distro of choice but dragging stuff around the desktop is pretty basic to so many operations that I really felt I had to go with the alternative.

Arch itself is of course pretty stable but I have found a steep learning curve
when it comes to system configuration (systemd !! and some odd-looking
interface names - eth0 has become enp0s25...) and package management (pacman with alleged dependency resolution which went horribly worng for me when I tried to un-install some packages).

Slackware is still there on the other partition and I will update it as current evolves in the hope that at some point the evdev and synaptics drivers catch up with my hardware.

Link to the section of the Arch wiki that mentions those patches, and I'll see what I can do about making them work with Slackware's sources.

5 members found this post helpful.

Here is the link to the patches I mentioned:

https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/x...ut-evdev-track

I cannot be certain, of course that these patches will solve my problem, but they sound relevant. All I really know is that current Arch, as shipped, had drivers which work with my trackpoint device.

Sorry for jumping in when I may be off track but is this, perhaps, a kernel issue? I know when I first installed Debian on this machine I had to compile my own kernel as the older version supplied with Sid (which ought to be new) wasn't new enough but once I moved to a 3.9 kernel things were OK and with the 4.0 all was well. Is it worth just compiling a new kernel on Slackware?

2 members found this post helpful.

I think there is an error in your link. Maybe this:
https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/x...dev-trackpoint

0001-implement-trackpoint-wheel-emulation.patch really needs to be broken up into two patches, one for evdev and one for synaptics. The new patches are attached.

0001-implement-trackpoint-wheel-emulation_evdev.txt (attached) is for Slackware's source/x/x11/src/driver/xf86-input-evdev-2.9.2.tar.xz.

0001-implement-trackpoint-wheel-synaptics.txt (attached) is for Slackware's source/x/x11/src/driver/xf86-input-synaptics-1.8.2.tar.xz

Arch's 0004-disable-clickpad_guess_clickfingers.patch applies as-is to Slackware's source/x/x11/src/driver/xf86-input-synaptics-1.8.2.tar.xz.

I've tested them as far as making sure that patching works. I haven't tried building them.

I did look at the third patch and wasn't sure how relevant it was (or what to do with it, tbh), so I decided to ignore it for now.

Attached Files

	0001-implement-trackpoint-wheel-emulation_evdev.txt (3.1 KB, 29 views)
	0001-implement-trackpoint-wheel-synaptics.txt (7.2 KB, 13 views)

Many thanks for sending these patches. I will try and apply them and post how I get on.

@dugan : Thanks for the patches. I applied them and ran the configure-make-make install to build the resulting files etc. The process seemed to work OK, but my trackpad is unfortunately behaving in the same way. At least I learned a bit about how to apply patches - something I had not had to do previously.

@273 : I'll have a go a building a new kernel to see if this helps.

Good News. Building kernel 4.1.3 worked pretty easily and appears to have solved the basic touchpad problems - ie drag operations now work fine with left and right buttons and middle button click is recognised. Should be easy now just to configure the middle button to do wheel emulation.

Nice example of how there is nearly always a solution to a Linux (Slackware) problem, even if you might need to be pointed in the right direction to find it.

Glad to hear it's sorted things out a little. I have two-finger scrolling but as yet but only have pinch-to-zoom in Google Maps for some reason.

On a funny sidenote as a reaction on the title of this thread: I own a Dell Optiplex SX270 and it refuses to run anything else but Slackware. I tried Debian, Arch, OpenSuse, Scientific Linux but it is only with Slackware that I could make it work properly. Anything else makes it crash or freezing up. It forces me to use Slackware

And that's a bad thing? ;-)

Kernel 4.1.3 works very well on my Thinkpad R500, and it's the next LTS kernel.

Tue Jul 7 22:59:17 UTC 2015
testing/source/config-testing-4.1.1/*: Added.

Maybe it'll replace 3.18.x in current