[ltp] R61 touchpad not recognized in Ubuntu

[Richard Neill]

John Jason Jordan wrote:
> On Mon, 26 Nov 2007 18:51:23 +0100
> "Ugo Riboni" <nerochiaro@neuros.us> dijo:
> 
>> So, ideally i'd like to get some advice on how to get the touchpad
>> recognized for what it is by the system, and failing that how to
>> disable the tap-to-click function completely.

OK. The "Right" way to do this is to set up a udev rule. Linux will 
treat each mouse as a separate device /dev/input/mouse0, 
/dev/input/mouse1  etc. (You also get /dev/input/eventX for some things).

/dev/input/mice  (usually symlinked as /dev/mouse) is a single, hybrid 
of all these, which is for some (daft) reason merged within the kernel.

Normally, X reads from /dev/mouse, and therefore gets all the mouse 
inputs simultaneously.

What you really should do is

1)Set up a udev rule for each mouse device. Create dedicated symlinks, 
eg   /dev/input/trackpoint, /dev/input/touchpad,  etc.

2)Set Xorg to have several Device sections, configured per-mouse. This 
lets you do things like having the trackpoint BTN_2 = EmulateWheel, but 
be able to middle-click-and-drag  with an external mouse.  One device is 
a CorePointer, the others are set to SendCoreEvents.  (You should 
probably use the synaptics driver for the touchpad).

3)Make sure Xorg.conf has AllowMouseOpenFail.

4)Restart X.


This does exactly what you want. The only thing that breaks is 
hotplugging devices during a running X-session. For this, you either 
need to use /dev/input/mice, or to restart your X-session.


Other options:

*  ksynaptics/synclient, together with SHMConfig=on

*  Turn off the touchpad in the BIOS

*  Possibly, something hacked out of GPM - but I never looked at this.


HTH,

Richard