Comment 8 for bug 288332

I understand it is frustrating not having an easy to use interface to get proper touchpad performance. I've reverted to Hardy from Intrepid due to other issues, but I didn't have touchpad issues with my xorg.conf.

Try something like this in /etc/X11/xorg.conf:

Section "InputDevice"
 Identifier "Synaptics Touchpad"
 Driver "synaptics"
 Option "SendCoreEvents" "true"
 Option "Device" "/dev/psaux"
 Option "Protocol" "auto-dev"
 Option "HorizEdgeScroll" "0"
 Option "LeftEdge" "130"
 Option "RightEdge" "840"
 Option "TopEdge" "130"
 Option "BottomEdge" "640"
 Option "FingerLow" "7"
 Option "FingerHigh" "8"
 Option "MaxTapTime" "180"
 Option "MinTapTime" "110"
 Option "ClickTime" "0"
 Option "EmulateMidButtonTime" "75"
 Option "VertScrollDelta" "20"
 Option "HorizScrollDelta" "20"
 Option "MinSpeed" "0.50"
 Option "MaxSpeed" "0.85"
 Option "AccelFactor" "0.050"
 Option "EdgeMotionMinSpeed" "200"
 Option "EdgeMotionMaxSpeed" "200"
 Option "UpDownScrolling" "1"
 Option "CircularScrolling" "off"
 Option "CircScrollDelta" "0.1"
 Option "CircScrollTrigger" "3"
 Option "VertEdgeScroll" "on"
EndSection

If you're really bored, look at the man page for "synaptics" to see what all the settings do. Though my setup is for the synaptic driver, I'm using an ALPS touchpad on a Dell Latitude, the synaptics driver supports both.