Touchpad not working in openSUSE 11.0
 

Running GNOME under openSUSE 11, I am unable to use my touchpad for controlling the mouse cursor on-screen. This seems to only affect one profile, as I logged on as another user and can use the touchpad to control the mouse w/o issue. I checked under Control Center > Touchpad and Enable Touchpad is selected, however I cannot control the mouse cursor under my main profile. I don't recall doing anything before to disable this, and also under Sessions in Control Center the startup program Touchpad is selected there. Again, this is only affecting my main profile, as I set up another account for testing and was able to control the cursor with the touchpad. Any ideas of what I need to check to resolve this? Thanks.

Also, in addition to this, I can use the mouse buttons associated with the touchpad within my main account to control mouse button clicks w/o any problems, just the cursor is unable to move.

Update: OK, now it is not working for my other profiles as well when logged into them. The only time that the touchpad can move the mouse cursor is at the login screen, so I am assuming that it has something to do with a setting within GNOME itself?

Update #2: After logging out of GNOME and into a KDE session, I was able to correctly use the touchpad in all its functionality. Also, I attempted a clean install of openSUSE 11 with the default GNOME installation (in order to rule out any updated packages), and the problem still persisted. Just to inform you, this is installed on a Gateway 450SX4 laptop with a Synaptic Touchpad (as according to the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file). ANyone else running GNOME and having issues with their touchpad mouse?

Update #3: OK, I found a resolution to the problem, but do not understand the implications. If I go to Control Center > Sessions, and then deselect Touchpad from the "Startup Programs" tab, whenever I restart my session I can successfully navigate the screen with the cursor using the touchpad. One item that I found interesting was when I selected the Edit button when highlighting the Touchpad item from the list. An "Edit Startup Program" window appears, and in the Command field the following is displayed:
I am not certain of the parameters of this command, but the portion that has --sm-disable is sort of concerning me. Does anyone know what this option does? It would appear that something within this command is conflicting with something else on my system using the GNOME session, but am unsure what it could be.

It seems seems there's all sorts of problems with touchpad and gnome under suse 11.0

KDE seems to work 100% OK.

If you want to try kde download / install Ksynaptics,

You can then control the touchpad anyway you want -- I usually disable the whole thing anyway -- I hate touchpads -- the old fashioned IBM laptops used to have a little button embedded somewhere in the keyboard which worked a treat but modern laptops have abandoned that idea.

I can't say that I've ever been a real fan of GNOME -- maybe having got too used to Windows in the past switching to Linux with KDE wasn't such a great problem.

The only thing I can currently say about Gnome is that it seems to be trying to be more like VISTA --which I absolutely HATED.

However getting back to the point again many other posts have mentioned problems with SUSE 11.0 and GNOME whilst the KDE interface seems to work OK (and if you don't like KDE 4 you can still use KDE 3.5).

Cheers

-K

The version of GNOME that is included by default with openSUSE 11.0 seems pretty basic to me, and does not appear to resemble Vista much at all (which is one of the reasons I like this window manager). Actually, I've felt in a manner similar about KDE, where I felt it was too much like MS Windows for my liking.

Anyway, after finally resolving the touchpad issue in GNOME, now whenever I log into KDE the touchpad will not work there. Go figure :(. It seems that it is one or the other, and not both. I am not a fan of touchpads myself either, but I occasionally use this laptop in other parts of the household area using wi-fi, and it is more convenient to use the touchpad than to lug around a mouse with it. Usually, I have a Logitech USB mouse connected to the port replicator for my usual browsing needs.

Hello there! :)

I had EXACTLY the same problem and I thank you very much for solving it!!!

I'm new to linux and such stuff makes me wanna go back to windows, but I resisted;)

Anyway, at first my touch pad worked fine, then I installed some software... I'm not sure what caused the problem, but I think it might have to do something with KDE (the problem started sometime after I installed Amarok). Like I said, I'm new around here and don't really have a clue, this is just a feeling I got when I tried to remember what did I install before the touch pad crashed.

I'm not a fan of touch pads, either, but you can't really use your mouse in bed or on a train, can you:) And it HAS TO WORK, KDE, Gnome or whatever. The answer to the problem cannot be: just switch to KDE and it'll work fine! That's why the forums are here.

Thanx again! :)

I didn't actually solve the problem, only found a workaround to the issue. Now, as I mentioned earlier, if I change my session from GNOME to KDE, now the touchpad does not work in KDE after performing the workaround in GNOME. I suppose that now I need ksynaptics for this to work in KDE now. The touchpad should have been working with its default parameters rather than having to disable a startup item in order to make it work properly in GNOME. There are quite a few others that have issues similar to this. With that, I don't understand how this could have gone unnoticed during development of openSUSE 11.0, since I don't recall having this issue in 10.3 on the same laptop.

I found this yesterday:

http://forums.opensuse.org/hardware/...-touchpad.html

I had this problem on all of my laptops on OpenSuse 11.0 with Gnome. I just found using a regular mouse I could change the settings in Control Panel and increase/decrease sensitivity and turning off some of the options fixed the glidepad on every single laptop.

Control Center >> Touchpad >> Acceleration Tab

Adjust the acceleration so it is greater than none and make sure the max speed is more than the minimum speed.

- Jim

Thanks for the solution swampdog2002!

That's the Opensource spirit afterall. ;)