Touchpad not fully functional

[Richard Green]

Binary package hint: xorg

Feisty Herd 4 (X86_64) on emachines M6810. Synaptics touchpad only partially works. Cursor movement OK. single-tap sometimes works, but not on all buttons. Double-tap/drag does not work. Scroll area at right of touchpad not recognized as a scrollwheel, but simply moves cursor along verticle line.

[Richard Green (rtg-aapsc)]

More info:
 initial install mis-identified the touchpad. This might explain the limited functionality. Snippet from xorg.conf:

Section "InputDevice"
  Identifier "Configured Mouse"
  Driver "mouse"
  option "CorePointer"
  option "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
  option "Protocol" "ExplorerPS/2"
  option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
  option "Emulate3Buttons" "true"
EndSection

[Richard Green (rtg-aapsc)]

Herd 5 now:
  same problem on initial install. While researching another problem (#89289), I was prompted to run 'dpkg-reconfigure -phigh xserver-xorg' This re-created the xorg.conf file, and did indeed detect the synaptic touchpad.
The vertical scroll area and the double-tap-and-drag selection technique now works!

Here's the area of xorg.conf as built by dpkg-reconfigure:

Section "InputDevice"
        Identifier "Synaptics Touchpad"
        Driver "synaptics"
        Option "SendCoreEvents" "true"
        Option "Device" "/dev/psaux"
        Option "Protocol" "auto-dev"
        Option "HorizScrollDelta" "0"
EndSection

:

[Amir Eldor (amireldor)]

Hello Richard, and thanks for the bug report!

As you mentioned the problem occuring on a development version of Feisty, I have to ask whether the problem still occurs when installing a fresh copy of Feitsy (or Gutsy) on the same machine.

Can you provide these details, so in case the problem is not fixed (i.e. the manual fix you've found is *not* needed after installing the new OS), we can tag it so the development team could have a look on this bug with the upcoming Gutsy?

[Richard Green (rtg-aapsc)]

The bug was still present in the released version of feisty. I have not
tried installing any of the gutsy milestones, since that machine is in
'production' use right now. Perhaps if I could locate a spare drive sled
for it, I could again do test installs on it.

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

We've also added a GUI tool for adjusting synaptics settings. Can you test use of that, to see if it addresses the problem?

[Amir Eldor (amireldor)]

which GUI are you talking about?

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

System > Preferences > Mouse > Touchpad in Gutsy

[Timo Aaltonen (tjaalton)]

Closing the bug since there has been no reply from the reporter since the latest question.