(Below for an appeal on how to disable tapping for the touchpad in Fedora 10, which is now different than previous.)
Upgraded to Fedora 10 on the Thinkpad T60, overall everything is pretty sweet. I tried to upgrade from F8 using Anaconda, the result wasn’t that pretty and left me nervous — I was still cleaning up from the last upgrade done that way, so I decided a fresh start was going to be OK. I have my full package list from before, now I’m just sorting through getting all the same software installed. The long road.
Why is that list 1000 packages long? During install, I got to the package selection screen and had a touchpad FAIL. The screen loaded the “Office and Productivity” default, where I would then normally go through the package groups and lists and add a whole bunch of fun stuff. But when Anaconda advanced to that screen, the mouse arrow was over the ”Next” button, and a click initiated by the touchpad tapping made it advance. Perhaps it was a coincidence that the arrow was over the button, but once you click ”Next” on that screen, there is no going back … even though there is a ”Back” button visible in the next screen.
Faced with abandoning and restarting the install, I figured I’d install and add packages later. Which is turning out to be hours of effort, partially because working with PackageKit and the stupid tap-is-a-click touchpad is such a PITA. I haven’t used the tap-click stuff in so many years and my rough touchpad style is causing lots of mis-clicks.
Since there is no longer an ‘xorg.conf’ file to add the details to make ‘gsynaptics’ work, I haven’t yet found how I am supposed to control touchpad details. I appeal to the wise Web and Fedora planet — any good ideas?
I suppose that if I were to make an ‘xorg.conf’, such as with `system-config-display`, it would work, but that defeats the otherwise stellar Xorg working method. If we get a better solution, I’ll be sure to post on fedoraforum.org about it.
Yes – just disable the touchpad in BIOS – the entire touchpad thing (on any notebook) is worthless, use the pointing stick and mouse buttons.
I make that the first thing that I do when I get a new Thinkpad.
I even disable it on my external thinkpad keyboard. That requires some disassembly, but results in a far more usable keyboard.
This worked for me:
http://www.quietvoice.org/2008/10/26/turning-off-synaptics-touchpad-in-fedora-10-beta/
Though my goal was to completely eliminate the touchpad. Once the SHMconfig is done, you should be good to go.
-k-
Oh, and that fdi stuff may not be directly cut-and-pasteable. Being inside HTML tags seems to have introduced some invisible characters.
Pasting it into a text editor, removing leading spaces, and re-indenting should work, though..
-k-
There are a few steps to disabling tapping, provided you’re hardware is synaptics supported.
First, a reason why it is so difficult. As part of the development to not have an xorg.conf file we’ve moved to hal based loading of input drivers, such as the synaptics driver. Unfortunately, this method of driver loading cannot currently pass options to the driver, such as the option to enable shmconfig. shmconfig is the method by which this driver gets configured at runtime, via tools such as gsynatics or synclient. This option isn’t enabled by default because it isn’t a very secure method, in fact I’m told it’s rather insecure. But for those of us that would like to tweak our our synaptic touch pads work, there is little alternative.
At a high level, one must create a minimal xorg.conf file that at least has an input section for the mouse, and enables SHMConfig. Next one must prevent hal from auto-loading the synaptic driver as this will undo any options put in the xorg.conf file. Lastly one must use a tool such as gsynaptics or synclient to adjust settings.
As for the xorg.conf file, the important part is:
Section “InputDevice”
Identifier “Synaptics”
Driver “synaptics”
Option “Device” “/dev/input/mice”
Option “Protocol” “auto-dev”
Option “Emulate3Buttons” “yes”
Option “SHMConfig” “True”
EndSection
That later needs to be included in a screen layout:
Section “ServerLayout”
Identifier “Default Layout”
#InputDevice “Keyboard0” “CoreKeyboard”
InputDevice “Synaptics” “CorePointer”
EndSection
As for hal, either remove /usr/share/hal/fdi/policy/20thirdparty/10-synaptics.fdi or edit it in such a way that it does not load the synaptics driver.
Lastly restart X/hal (a reboot would suffice), then install/run gsynaptics or synclient to adjust your touchpad.
Hi there,
The following is how I disabled tapping on my acer 4315. A complete HACK as gdm-stop doesn’t seem to work….
1) ctrl-alt-2 , login as root
2) chmod -x /usr/sbin/gdm && gdm-stop
3) X -configure
4) X -config /root/xorg.conf.new (to test)
5) modify the xorg.conf.new so the mouse driver is “synaptics” and an additional line to the mouse section:
Option “SHMConfig†“Trueâ€
6) cp /root/xorg.conf.new /etc/X11/xorg.conf
7) chmod +x /usr/sbin/gdm
8) yum install gsynaptics
9) gdm
10) login as your user
11) su – -c “gsynaptics”
12) turn off tapping in gsynaptics
Why is tapping suddenly again enabled by default, in Fedora 9 it was turned off?
I don’t see why you couldn’t set the TapButton[123] options to 0 in a .fdi file and avoid creating an xorg.conf. You can definitely pass options to the driver this way, I’m doing it to set a few options that I crave for my touchpad.
I created /etc/hal/fdi/policy/11-synaptics.fdi with the following contents:
20
(Hopefully the contents aren’t mangled too badly by wordpress. 🙂
Hmm. SHMConfig is considered, in retrospect, “broken by design.”
Take a look at this.
http://fedoraforum.org/forum/showthread.php?t=194784
This was originally developed in response to F9’s _lack_ of tapping (and its suspend/resume problems), but the first five posts (2 and 5, in particular) effectively demonstrate how to alter your HAL FDI file for synaptics. This is preferred instead of changing your nonexistent xorg.conf.
To each his own, I suppose. I could not live without tap-to-click; on every laptop except a MacBook that I’ve tried, all laptop mouse buttons seem extremely cheap, and I’ve broken the buttons on my Dell after a year or two. I have touchpad-mouse-button-phobia now, and I’d much rather tap.
[…] few days ago we got a nice view in to all the opinions and methods for dealing with tapping and the touchpad in Fedora 10. Today I did an hour of work getting Jesse’s suggestion working. In the end, the minimal […]
I am running Fedora 9, and the below HAL solution worked for me. I haven’t yet ran it in Fedora 10. Would appreciate feedback on whether or not it still works.
This worked for me, to enable the Synaptics touchpad “gsynaptics” GUI configuration utility, and also the “synclient” command-line utility. In there, I can mercifully turn off tapping on the touchpad. No more ghost clicks!
Don’t edit your xorg.conf file. Instead, edit the HAL policy file, which autoloads the Synaptics driver on demand. It’s difficult to edit the xorg.conf file directly, because the input device number can be different each time. This is the file, which should already exist if you installed the “xorg-x11-drv-synaptics” package:
/usr/share/hal/fdi/policy/20thirdparty/10-synaptics.fdi
Here’s the contents of the file:
[QUOTE]
synaptics
on
synaptics
on
synaptics
on
synaptics
on
[/QUOTE]
Basically, what you do is take the existing file, and add the x11_options lines, just below all of the x11_driver lines. This forces HAL to stuff in the correct options to the driver, as it loads. Very handy!
You might have to reboot in order to get HAL and X to all completely reload. You can see the results in the /var/log/Xorg.0.log file:
[QUOTE](II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/input//synaptics_drv.so
(II) Module synaptics: vendor=”X.Org Foundation”
compiled for 1.5.0, module version = 0.15.1
Module class: X.Org XInput Driver
ABI class: X.Org XInput driver, version 2.1
(II) Synaptics touchpad driver version 0.15.1
(II) SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad: x-axis range 1472 – 5472
(II) SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad: y-axis range 1408 – 4448
(**) Option “Device” “/dev/input/event6”
(**) Option “SHMConfig” “on”
(–) SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad touchpad found
(**) SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad: always reports core events
(II) XINPUT: Adding extended input device “SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad” (type: MOUSE)
(II) SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad: x-axis range 1472 – 5472
(II) SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad: y-axis range 1408 – 4448
(–) SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad touchpad found
[/QUOTE]
The line in the middle, about SHMConfig on, indicates success.
Sorry for the above post. It looks like this blog doesn’t support angle brackets in comments. Can’t post a HAL policy file without those….
I also posted it to linuxquestions.org here:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/showthread.php?p=3393958#post3393958