Comment 71 for bug 311869

The driver for Sentelic’s touchpad has been in Ubuntu’s kernel at least since Lucid, but it is incomplete. Sentelic has crippled the driver (due to patent scares) by removing absolute positioning, even though it was in the original source. This has the consequence that the “synaptics” driver cannot pick up touchpad events and use them to certain standard features, including: edge scrolling, corners (all four), and possibly even two-finger scrolling. Anyone who’s used this touchpad knows how difficult it is to use a touchpad that doesn’t have good scrolling support.

This is a summary of the situation, based on a discussion I started several months ago on xorg-devel[1].

To fix this bug properly, Sentelic’s source for absolute positioning needs to be re-added to the driver. This being a bit out of my technical comfort zone, there hasn’t been much progress in my attempts to do this.

Incidentally, fixing this driver properly should also allow for standard touchpad graphical configuration utilities to work, regardless of whether Sentelic’s utility works.

Anyone want to help?

[1] http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xorg/2010-July/thread.html#50726