Irresponsive Touchpad

[Marius Gedminas]

On Sat, Aug 08, 2009 at 12:44:00PM +0100, DaveGK wrote:
> I'm experiencing a rather strange touchpad behaviour - sometimes it's 
> fine, sometimes I have to tap it a few times to get result. Also, for 
> some reason there's no touchpad tab in mouse preferences window.

Interesting.

Do you happen to know the make and model of your touchpad?  Perhaps it's
not supported by X/kernel and falls back to mouse emulation?

You could look at /var/log/Xorg.0.log and see if it mentions anything
about a touchpad.  In my case I get

  (II) config/hal: Adding input device SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad
  ...
  (--) SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad touchpad found
  ...
  (II) XINPUT: Adding extended input device "SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad" (type: TOUCHPAD)

and a few more lines.  Or you could run

  xinput list

in a terminal and see if your touchpad is mentioned by name there.

> I did 
> check in gconf-editor and touchpad is checked. An attempt to install 
> GSynaptics wasn't successful: all seems fine, but when I try to start 
> it, I get:
> " GSynaptics couldn't initialize. You have to set 'SHMConfig' 'true' in 
> xorg.conf or XF86Config to use GSynaptics "
> Now, there is no SHMConfig in the xorg.conf and I don't know what to add 
> (i.e. there must be a subsection etc).

That's obsolete; you can now use xinput to set up input devices at
runtime.  I believe the standard Mouse configuration applet uses that; I
don't know any other replacements for GSynaptics.

> System: Ubuntu Jaunty 64-bit, ext4. Acer Aspire 7735G
> 
> Appreciate any help, but please be gentle - a newbie here :))

Marius Gedminas
-- 
I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when
you looked at it in the right way, did not become still more complicated.
                -- Poul Anderson
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