Touchpad movement problems in 0.99.3

[Anders Kaseorg]

Binary package hint: xserver-xorg-input-synaptics

After installing today’s Jaunty update xserver-xorg-input-synaptics 0.15.2-0ubuntu8 -> 0.99.3-1ubuntu1, my touchpad is going crazy. It became ~5 times more sensitive, so it is very hard to control. Furthermore, when using Compiz, if I drag a window so that it touches any edge of the screen, the pointer and the window immediately jump to the upper-left corner of the screen.

These problems do not occur when using a mouse, or after downgrading to 0.15.2-0ubuntu8.

[Anders Kaseorg (andersk)]

It was suggested on IRC that the problem could be an xinput setting. Here is the output of `xinput list` with the old package 0.15.2-0ubuntu8.

[Anders Kaseorg (andersk)]

And here is the output of `xinput list` with the new package 0.99.3-1ubuntu1.

[Anders Kaseorg (andersk)]

Tap-to-click is also broken with 0.99.3-1ubuntu1.

[Anders Kaseorg (andersk)]

I suppose the `xinput list-props` output is more interesting. Here’s a diff of that output from 0.15.2-0ubuntu8 to 0.99.3-1ubuntu1.

[Max Bowsher (maxb)]

See also bug 320585 and bug 320632, other issues with this new version.

[Alberto Milone (albertomilone)]

The following patch will reduce the speed of the cursor.

[Alberto Milone (albertomilone)]

The following patch will restore corner-tapping. It's an updated version of my patch for the previous upstream release.

[Wouter Stomp (wouterstomp-deactivatedaccount)]

I actually appreciated the increased cursor speed. I have a thinkpad sl300 (with an Alps touchpad) and previously the cursor speed was very very slow taking at least four sweeps across the touchpad to get to the other side of the screen. The new settings are much better! (although I saw an updated package has already been uploaded which decreases the speed again). Ideally the settings should depend on the type of touchpad you have and gnome should have a sensitivity setting in the touchpad tab of the mouse settings.

[Anders Kaseorg (andersk)]

0.99.3-1ubuntu2 shows some improvement, but still has major issues. Although the maximum speed of the touchpad is just a little more than the 0.15.2 maximum, the minimum speed is much less—like a third of the 0.15.2 minimum. This makes the pointer much harder to control. Perhaps this is to some extent a matter of taste, but the change feels rather drastic and could indicate a bug (perhaps the Xorg core and the synaptics driver are independently applying their own separate accelerations)?

The window dragging bug where the pointer jumps to the upper-left corner is still present.

[Daniel Queirolo (danf-1979)]

Anders, same here. Minimum speed is just to slow with 0.99.3-1ubuntu2. It is not a matter of taste, it is a usability problem. It is very hard to precisely control the cursor using the touchpad now. Please fix this.

[Daniel Queirolo (danf-1979)]

At least here (Dell Inspiron 9400), it seems that problems are related to "dragging":

1) When you click and drag a window to move it around, it will maximize. Go to preferences->mouse and pretend you're dragging around something inside the bulb icon area. It will behave erraticaly. Its buggy.
2) Selecting text for copy-paste is impossible. It can't be done anymore. It results in PASTING whatever is on the clipboard. Yes, selecting text results in pasting, odd but true.

[Daniel Queirolo (danf-1979)]

Xorg.0.log

[Trip Ericson (rovfan)]

Confirming Mr. Queirolo's issue, though I have a problem where dragging just fails. It'll sort of "unclick" so where I'll be dragging it'll let go and then click again start me resizing the window or something.

[Anders Kaseorg (andersk)]

Right. The way I usually drag something is to put a finger on the physical mouse button, then make several strokes on the touchpad in the intended direction. But with 0.99.3, the first time I lift my finger from the touchpad is interpreted as a mouse up event that ends the drag operation.

[Mackenzie Morgan (maco.m)]

Setting to High importance since the touchpad is a very important bit of a laptop.

Also, I think the "it thinks everything is a middle-click" is to blame for the paste-as-soon-as-highlighted issue--when you release the highlight, its generating a middle-click just like when you release any other left-click.

[Luka Renko (lure)]

Proper workaround is to downgrade to version 0.15.2-0ubuntu8 package. You can get the package for your architecture here:
https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xfree86-driver-synaptics/0.15.2-0ubuntu8

Alberto: should your patch also address bug 322659 ?

[Connor Imes (ckimes)]

Alberto, can you also please have a look at bug 320979 for me?
I wanted to mark as a duplicate of this, but the reporter insists it is not the same. It just seems that everybody experiences slightly different bad behavior with this package version. Thank you!

[Anders Kaseorg (andersk)]

Many of these problems are resolved in 0.99.3-2ubuntu2. However, the pointer is still very hard to control, because the speed varies wildly between its minimum and maximum.

Here is some documentation from the Xorg wiki which confirms my suspicion that both the Xorg core and the synaptics driver are independently applying their own acceleration curves.

http://www.x.org/wiki/Development/Documentation/PointerAcceleration#head-ff75ddde3561d3a8bbb53042a6ea94c4c8958a2c

The solution apparently is to set the synaptics MinSpeed and MaxSpeed values to be _equal_, and let Xorg core do all the acceleration itself.

[Michael Marley (mamarley)]

I just tried this, and it does significantly improve pointer controllability. However, the pointer still moves too fast for small movements on the touchpad (even rocking your finger back and forth). This still makes it hard to click on small links without overshooting the movement and having to go back.

[Festr (festr2)]

It seems there is many way how to control acceleration. Someone could clarify more precisly, how to achieve the best settings with synaptics. If synaptics has its own acceleration method it would be better to turn off X acceleration? How to do this?

[Nick HS (nickhs)]

Left click sporadically acting as middle click is a problem for me still.

[Michael Marley (mamarley)]

I noticed today that xorg synaptics 1.0.0 has been released. Might this fix the problem?

[Max Bowsher (maxb)]

The changes in 1.0.0 are fairly minimal, and seem unrelated:

$ git log xf86-input-synaptics-0.99.3..xf86-input-synaptics-1.0.0
commit 61ed46a808a293635f5abf5bc7cf1f5d279d908d
Author: Peter Hutterer <email address hidden>
Date: Mon Feb 2 09:29:51 2009 +1000

    synaptics 1.0

commit 2839caaab77163c0d6e9a27b825ec1a3622004c1
Author: Peter Hutterer <email address hidden>
Date: Mon Jan 19 09:26:14 2009 +1100

    properties: implement float properties.

    Signed-off-by: Peter Hutterer <email address hidden>
    Signed-off-by: Christoph Brill <email address hidden>
    Signed-off-by: Henrik Rydberg <email address hidden>
    (cherry picked from commit f92446f00aa5a916a90e2fd93333f97ea837f985)

commit fc6cea805918dab43e1cf7700b1f2bffcaa5f467
Author: Alan Coopersmith <email address hidden>
Date: Fri Jan 9 16:22:56 2009 -0800

    Remove xorgconfig & xorgcfg from See Also list in man page
    (cherry picked from commit 97530109c3dbafe51395ea70008f594f0ce102f3)

commit 1b3428b0f8736d5a7ebf2abff10084f613e1d33a
Author: Christoph Brill <email address hidden>
Date: Sat Dec 20 14:17:45 2008 +0100

    FDI: Add few examples suggested by Christian Schmitt <email address hidden>

    Signed-off-by: Christoph Brill <email address hidden>

[Hassan Ibraheem (hassan-ibraheem)]

I have updated the synaptics driver (with some other updates) and restarted X , but the problem remained.
However, the next reboot, the bug doesn't affect me anymore.
For a couple of days now, I've not encountered this bug.

[Michael Marley (mamarley)]

The problem here is definitely caused by both Xorg and the Synaptics driver doing acceleration. Before the update, I believe that only the Synaptics driver was doing it, but the updated driver fails to turn it off. Turning of acceleration in the Synaptics driver and letting Xorg do it all works slightly better, but the touchpad still seems way to sensitive to small movements, so it would be great if Xorg acceleration could be turned off so that the regular Synaptics acceleration could be reenabled.

[DanielRoesler (diafygi)]

I downloaded and did a clean install of the Jaunty beta. The problem still exists, but it's less often (maybe 1 out of every 8 taps, not 1 out of 4). Can others confirm?

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

I've just updated Karmic's xserver-xorg-input-synaptics to 1.1.2-1ubuntu1 which now includes the upstream changes as well as the ubuntu patches we've been carrying. Is anyone still having this specific touchpad movement problem on karmic with this version of synaptics?

[Anders Kaseorg (andersk)]

I just tried version 1.1.2-1ubuntu1 with no extra configuration,
and my comment 18 still applies:

> However, the pointer is still very hard to control, because the
> speed varies wildly between its minimum and maximum.
>
> Here is some documentation from the Xorg wiki which confirms my
> suspicion that both the Xorg core and the synaptics driver are
> independently applying their own acceleration curves.
>
> http://www.x.org/wiki/Development/Documentation/PointerAcceleration#head-ff75ddde3561d3a8bbb53042a6ea94c4c8958a2c
>
> The solution apparently is to set the synaptics MinSpeed and
> MaxSpeed values to be _equal_, and let Xorg core do all the
> acceleration itself.

Since then I have been running with a custom /etc/hal/fdi/policy/anders-synaptics.fdi that sets MaxSpeed == MinSpeed, and I have found the pointer much easier to control. Xorg is indeed still accelerating the pointer, but its acceleration is a lot smoother than the synaptics driver’s.

[dmgood (gooddm)]

hi! recently installed ubuntu on my kid's netbook (dell inspiron). the synaptics touchpad is so darn glitchy that it is barely usable. Been poking around, and all roads lead to this bug report...

attempts to click/drag result in the mouse flying all over the screen (along with whatever you were unfortunate to click/drag on). attempts to click result in the pointer moving a bit before executing the offending click (which has you missing the thing you wanted to click more often than not.

There has been some stuff on killing acceleration to fix/improve things. Pretty please clue me in on how this is done. Pretty please also dont mark this as fixed, as it still needs some TLC.

Watching synclient at work... im wondering if the touchpd extents are properly configured.
upper left hand corner reports 1200'ish x 1300'ish, and the area directly above the clicker thingy reports 1800 x 4600. so click dragging would bounce the mouse to the lower-left whenever you raise your finger during the drag action (which looks to be about what is happening).

is there a way to tell the driver to stop registering touchies along the bottom of pad? just a thought.

thanks!

[mannheim (kronheim)]

I installed karmic from the live CD and did and did dist-upgrade to latest packages (on Sep 7). I have xserver-xorg-input-synaptics version 1.1.2-1ubuntu5.

Out of the box, the touchpad on my Dell XPS M1330 is impossibly fast. After going to the Mouse control panel and turning both controls to their minimum, the Mouse is still too fast (for me). I also believe that the Sensitivity scale is not doing anything.

Surely the priority of this bug should be high if laptop touchpads are unusable by normal humans on standard hardware?

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

> Surely the priority of this bug should be high if laptop touchpads are unusable by normal humans on standard hardware?

Works fine for me. Besides, 'High' is reserved for severe X issues such as crashes or the mouse not working at all. Medium is appropriate for this bug report.

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

Alberto, you posted two patches in comments #6 and #7. Are these still relevant for karmic?

[Anders Kaseorg (andersk)]

Those two patches were already added in 0.99.3-1ubuntu2; the first is obsolete and the second is still there.

But I still think we should set MaxSpeed == MinSpeed to avoid double-accelerating the pointer as of Xorg server 1.6 (comment #28), as the double acceleration makes the pointer difficult to control.

[Michael Marley (mamarley)]

Perhaps a better option would be to disable Xorg's acceleration for Synaptics device only, rather than disabling the Synaptics acceleration. When I disable Synaptics acceleration and use Xorg's acceleration, the pointer is still extremely sensitive to small movements, and this makes it hard to hit small buttons, links, and the like. Using the native Synaptics acceleration with disabled Xorg acceleration (by executing "xinput set-ptr-feedback "SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad" 0 0 1") the touchpad feels the same as it would on a w!nd0ze system.

[dmgood (gooddm)]

inability to do basic mousey things like rubber-banding and clicking with precision is kinda like the mouse not working at all. This just might be worthy of the coveted high priority sticker.

This bug is being reported all over the place. At one point, I was playing with the gsynaptic stuff, and schemed what might be the matter. Check out: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1234544

Or,
---pasty---
Hi!

Thanks for responding to my plight

Sadly, I lost the battle of Dave vs. the Touchypad... my kid's confuser now has WinXP installed on it. Under Win, the touchpad works as expected, so it is pretty certainly something is amiss afoot alas with the linux driver.

Before calling no glory however, I was finally able to get gsynaptc stuff working. This allowed me to watch the data-stream coming back from the touchpad. The results were... interesting.

First up, the touchpad on this netbook is weird. The buttons are integrated in to the touchy surface and not separate. When you touch the area over the buttons, the driver reports the XY coordinates of the touch.

When you click the button, the driver reports the touch before the click occurs. As you start to press on the button and before it clicks, you will see the XY coordinates of the touch moving a bit. The mouse cursor responds by moving, thereby causing you to miss what you were tryin to click on more often than not.

As to the drag thing being a drag... process is, click and hold the button, then slide your finger over the surface. As you run out of surface, pick up your finger and rinse/repeat. Except... as soon as you lift your finger, the driver screams that the lower left corner is now being touched (tis where you are holding the button), and the rubber-band responds by jumping that way. This is why dragging is hosed.

Seemed the obvious fix was to get the driver to stop reporting touches along the bottom edge of the pad. I spent a good bit of time playing with xorg.conf setting trying to get the driver to ignore that area of the screen... I never could get then the settings to do what I was looking for.

Looking in the bug-lists, this problem is being reported in various places. It appears that the smart folks are on the case. Perhaps someone will crack this before too long.

--Dave

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

Anyone want to try proposing a patch?

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for xserver-xorg-input-synaptics (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]