Mouse drift on Dell Latitude c840 running Feisty 7.04

[Erik Christiansen]

On Mon, May 14, 2007 at 12:22:03PM -0400, Adam wrote:
> The issue is that the mouse cursor has a mind of its own, wandering to
> (and getting stuck in) either the upper-right or lower-left corner of
> the screen. I've seen others post similar reports, but so far I haven't
> seen any resolution that works on my laptop.
...
> Here's the InputDevice section of my xorg.conf for the touchpad:
> Section "InputDevice"
> 	Identifier	"Synaptics Touchpad"
> 	Driver		"synaptics"
> 	Option		"SendCoreEvents"	"true"
> 	Option		"Device"		"/dev/psaux"
> 	Option		"Protocol"		"auto-dev"
> 	Option		"HorizScrollDelta"	"0"
> EndSection
> 
> 
> I'm hoping to get lucky and find someone who knows a magic fix for this
> problem. It's driving me crazy!

Adam,

  My Synaptics Touchpad was also unusably wild until I adjusted
acceleration and speed parameters, following helpful hints on this list.
I just fiddled the factors until the cursor behaviour suited:

Section "InputDevice"
   Identifier  "Synaptics Touchpad"
   Driver      "synaptics"
   Option      "SendCoreEvents"  "true"
   Option      "Device"    "/dev/psaux"
   Option      "Protocol"     "auto-dev"
   Option      "HorizScrollDelta"   "0"
#  Added 2006.04.12, to fix wild cursor text selection overshoot on
#  NEC Versa  P8100:
#  Option      "MinSpeed"      "0.2"
#  Option      "MaxSpeed"      "1.0"
#  Option      "AccelFactor"   "0.0"
    Option     "MinSpeed"      "0.1"
    Option     "MaxSpeed"      "0.75"
    Option     "AccelFactor"   "0.0"
#  Added 2006.06.06, to allow touchpad to be turned off:
   Option      "SHMConfig" "on"
EndSection

I'd never go back to hunting around the desk for a mouse, after the
convenience of a touchpad, especially after adding the last line above,
and running:

syndaemon -i 1 -d

so the touchpad ignores any thumbs straying onto the pad during typing.

Oh, one caveat; the above is being used on Breezy, but the innards of
xorg configuration have presumably not become inconsistent since then.

Erik