Comment 144 for bug 582809

I've taken the SuSE patches which add clickpad functionality to the x.org synaptics driver and ported all of them to the Ubuntu xserver-xorg-input-synaptics package (the version currently in Natty).

The result is pretty promising, though I'm doing it to make my wife's HP Envy laptop usable and I do not use the laptop on a daily basis, the basics like click-and-drag, etc, seem to be working (don't ask me about multi-touch, gestures, etc).

A tarball of the patches is here (they are as similar to the SuSE patches as possible, 212-fixups.patch contains the additions to make the result compile cleanly):
http://david.hardeman.nu/synaptics-suse-patches.tar.bz2

To build your own xserver-xorg-input-synaptics package, do:

mkdir tmpbuild
cd tmpbuild
wget http://david.hardeman.nu/synaptics-suse-patches.tar.bz2
apt-get source xserver-xorg-input-synaptics
cd xserver-xorg-input-synaptics-<version>
cd debian
cd patches
tar xfvj ../../../synaptics-suse-patches.tar.bz2
ls -1 2*.patch >> series
cd ..
cd ..
sudo apt-get build-dep xserver-xorg-input-synaptics
dpkg-buildpackage -us -uc -rfakeroot
sudo dpkg -i ../xserver-xorg-input-synaptics_<version>_<arch>.deb

And then restart your X server

Left as an exercise for the reader:

You can also build a custom version of the psmouse kernel driver with support for the clickpad enable/disable led using another SuSE patch available here:

https://build.opensuse.org/package/files?package=kernel-desktop&project=openSUSE%3AFactory
File patches.drivers.tar.bz2, patch input-Add-LED-support-to-Synaptics-device

The result seems quite crash-prone though