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Synaptic tapping fail, is there a good fix?

(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.