Comment 0 for bug 288332

Binary package hint: xserver-xorg

On upgrading to Intrepid, I can't find any way to change synaptics touchpad settings. I think it's crucial to make it easy for people to adjust these settings, as many people use laptops and a badly adjusted touchpad makes for a terrible computing experience.

When I initially tried to change the settings using a synclient bash script I had been using in Hardy, I got the error message that SHMConfig needed to be set to "true" in xorg.conf. I got the same error message when I tried to use the "Touchpad" dialog under the Preferences menu. I created a /etc/hal/fdi/policy/shmconfig.fdi file as was suggested in one how-to, although this didn't seem to have any effect. Then I edited xorg.conf and the error messages went away, but the Touchpad dialog and synclient still have no effect. The only way I can find to influence the touchpad speed is using the Mouse dialog, whose maximum speed is painfully slow (and which only configures a couple variables).

I read some how-tos saying that this system had changed fundamentally with Intrepid and that other programs were now preferred to synclient, but all the solutions seem pretty arcane and don't seem to allow you to control many variables. Is there any plan to make a functional gui for this? Or at least to make it so that it doesn't take hours of research to get basic touchpad settings to work acceptably?