Synaptics Trouble After Dapper Upgrade

[chrishack14]

Well, so I upgraded from Breezy to Dapper last night, and I have to say the Kubuntu developers have made some HUGE improvements.  However, there are a few problems lingering from Breezy and one entirely new one, which has me stumped.

Initially, my touchpad mouse was going nuts, randomly "clicking" on things every time I moved the mouse over them, whether I actually clicked or not.  This was partially solved by installing a newer version of xfree86-driver-synaptics.  I read somewhere that this was the updated version 0.14.4 and had some fixes for 64-bit systems (I use AMD64), and the mouse will behave now.  However, this has deactivated the "scrollbar" capabilities and the "tap-and-drag" capabilities of my touchpad (which were there with the older driver).  Furthermore, ksynaptic cannot be installed from the repos (depends on the older version of the driver), and I cannot get it to install properly after building it from source.  Has anyone else had this problem?  Any ideas, or should I file a bug report?  Thanks.

[chrishack14]

Re: Synaptics Trouble After Dapper Upgrade

Never mind. After doing some more reading and piecing together bits and pieces of other people's workarounds, I finally got my touchpad working properly. This seems to be a pretty common problem on AMD64 systems, though, so if anyone is having a similar problem reply here and I'll try to give some advice. I'm still thinking I might file a bug report, though, because it shouldn't have been that hard to get a touchpad working...

[mikro2nd]

Re: Synaptics Trouble After Dapper Upgrade

Hey, chrishack14, PLEASE post what you did - I have exactly the same problems on a Centrino laptop, so its not AMD-specific.

Symptoms: over-sensitive "click" on touchpad; scroll area has ceased to function.

The click sensitivity I think I can live with, and probably do something about if it bugs me too much, but I really, /really/ need the scrolling thing...

[chrishack14]

Re: Synaptics Trouble After Dapper Upgrade

Sorry for the slow response, I've been super busy the last few days.

Anyway, I went through a lot of stuff to get the touchpad working, and I'm not sure exactly what fixed things, but here are some things to try...

First of all, the xserver-xorg-input-synaptics driver package that is installed by default in Dapper seems to be at least part of the problem. Therefore, I recommend removing that package. The alternative xfree86-driver-synaptics may work: it fixed the oversensitivity for me but disabled the scroll bar. If it doesn't work, do what I did and compile the latest driver (actually I think there's a newer one now, but I'm using version 0.14-4) from http://web.telia.com/~u89404340/touchpad/files/ and install that (making sure the other synaptic driver packages have been removed).

Then you may need to edit you /etc/X11/xorg.conf file. Apparently this is necessary for some people and not for others, but if you find you need to, the relevant sections of mine look like:

Section "InputDevice"
    Identifier   "Synaptics Touchpad"
    Driver     "synaptics"
    Option     "SendCoreEvents"    "true"
    Option     "Device"        "/dev/psaux"
    Option     "Protocol"       "auto-dev"
    Option     "HorizScrollDelta"   "0"
EndSection

and

Section "ServerLayout"
    Identifier   "Default Layout"
    Screen     "Default Screen"
    InputDevice   "Generic Keyboard"
    InputDevice   "Configured Mouse"
    InputDevice   "stylus" "SendCoreEvents"
    InputDevice   "cursor" "SendCoreEvents"
    InputDevice   "eraser" "SendCoreEvents"
    InputDevice   "Synaptics Touchpad"
EndSection

If you have another "Configured Mouse" input device, you should leave it in there, I think.

See if that helps. If not, post back here and maybe if I think about it some more I can come up with some other things to try.