synaptic touchpad flakey on 2nd gen macbook

[Zach]

Binary package hint: xorg-driver-synaptics

The sensitivity of the touchpad on the macbook is very flakey.

Sometimes the touchpad is extremely sensitive, and registers touches or movements when it shouldn't.
Other times it is not sensitive enough, not registering touches or movements.

In particular, it seems that the center area of the touchpad seems have more trouble registering touches and movement, where the outlying areas of the touchpad generally seem to be hypersensitive. This isn't always the case though, as sensitivity seems to vary from one moment to the next.

The touchpad works fine when booting into OS X, which seems to indicate proper hardware function.

These symptoms can be somewhat mitigated by tuning the synaptics driver section of xorg.conf, or by tuning the synaptics driver using synclient.

Hardware is 2nd gen (Nov 2006) core 2 black macbook

uname -a:
Linux tatooine 2.6.20-16-generic #2 SMP Thu Jun 7 20:19:32 UTC 2007 i686 GNU/Linux

[Zach (uid000)]

Another symptom is that sometimes a touch is inappropriately registered during a movement, resulting in an undesired click & drag.

[Lauri Kainulainen (luopio)]

I can verify this on a macbook pro (third generation). It's quite hard to explain, but "flakey" does describe it quite well. Looking into Xorg.0.log, I see no problems with driver initialization.

[Jeff Anderson (jander99)]

Hello and thank you for helping to make Ubuntu better. Unfortunately this issue has not been updated in some time. Can you please tell us if this issue is still a problem for you?

[Slick (slick666)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. We are sorry that we do not always have the capacity to look at all reported bugs in a timely manner. There have been many changes in Ubuntu since that time you reported the bug and your problem may have been fixed with some of the updates. If you could test the current Ubuntu development version, this would help us a lot. If you can test it, and it is still an issue, we would appreciate if you could upload updated logs by running apport-collect 120716, and any other logs that are relevant for this particular issue.

I've confirmed that this is not a problem on a MacBook 1,1 using the kernel Linux Macintel 2.6.31-20-generic