Emulation of non existant buttons with synaptics mouse

[Pietro Battiston]

Binary package hint: xserver-xorg-input-synaptics

On Edgy my touchpad just worked fine. On Feisty (upgraded from Edgy, up to date, 64 bit, kernel 2.6.20-12-generic) I noticed a very strange behaviour, that it took me some time to understand.

This is the problem: the touchpad area is divided in 2 parts, an upper (around 2/3 of the height) and a lower (around 1/3).

The upper works just as the whole touchpad used to work under edgy: allows moving, tapping and, in its right part, scrolling.

The lower part instead has this behaviour:
- left-dragging -> gives the "back" command (to browsers that support it)
- right-dragging -> gives the "forward" command (to browsers that support it)
- clicking in the right (bottom) corner: button 2 (right button)

It seems like it's a new functionality, not a regression: probably there are more advanced touchpads that have markings, specifical areas separated from the rest, but...
1- it should be possible to turn it off/on from the "preferences->mouse" menu
2- on touchpads like mine, where there are no extra buttons/markings/areas, it should be disabled by default (it is VERY confusing to the average user, and is not implemented in Windows)
3- to make it useful, the area on which it applies should be MUCH smaller than 1/3 of total touchpad and probably the dragging should be much less sensitive (it requires some training to come back of only 1 page at a time in Firefox)

I'd like to point out the fact that, after half an hour of "researching" and half an hour of training, I'm beginning to like it (thought point 3 is important). So I would like this feature to stay. But absolutely not by default.

[Pietro Battiston (toobaz)]

After some others researches, I understand my error: the added feature is just horizontal scrolling, and it's only Firefox that binds it to "back" and "forward".

I also understand that it is a behaviour desired by many people. So the only point that still applies is that 1/3 of the whole touchpad is too much!

I would also suggest integrating qsynaptics (or something similar) with the "preferences->mouse" menu, but this is already discussed in other bug reports.

[Timo Aaltonen (tjaalton)]

it should be fixed already, Horizontal scrolling was disabled again since it doesn't work right on all hardware. Please try running 'sudo dpkg-reconfigure -phigh xserver-xorg' and restart gdm/X.

[Pietro Battiston (toobaz)]

Right, now it's as in Edgy. Couldn't xorg.conf be shipped with the option SHMconfig on by default, so that qsynaptics could be used "out of the box"?

Anyway, it's just a suggestion, I think bug can be closed.

[Pascal De Vuyst (pascal-devuyst)]

Closing this bug then, feel free to reopen if the problem returns.
Your suggestion has already been reported as bug #37234.