anybody get the ALPS touchpad to work correctly from the Dell E series laptops?

I have a Precision M2400 (basically the same as the E6400) and this touch pad is driving me nuts. During the day I use a USB mouse, which works fine, but when I'm at home at night I use the touch pad. The movement is much too slow, so I turn it up in the mouse properties. When I go back into work in the morning, the USB mouse is way too fast and I have to go back in and turn the mouse speed back down.

I'm running a fresh Fedora 10 install and have tried adding it to the xorg.conf as a synaptics device (read some have had success with that), which did not work for me. When I ran Ubuntu on my D630, I remembered installing gsynaptics to control the touch pad, but I get the 'SHMConfig must be true' error when trying to launch.

I ran 'cat /proc/bus/input/devices/, and came up with this. I'm not sure if it's the 'generic ps2 mouse' or the 'Macintosh mouse button emulation'

I: Bus=0017 Vendor=0001 Product=0001 Version=0100
N: Name="Macintosh mouse button emulation"
P: Phys=
S: Sysfs=/devices/virtual/input/input3
U: Uniq=
H: Handlers=mouse0 event3
B: EV=7
B: KEY=70000 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
B: REL=3

I: Bus=0011 Vendor=0002 Product=0001 Version=0000
N: Name="PS/2 Generic Mouse"
P: Phys=isa0060/serio1/input0
S: Sysfs=/devices/platform/i8042/serio1/input/input5
U: Uniq=
H: Handlers=mouse1 event5
B: EV=7
B: KEY=70000 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
B: REL=3


has anyone else encountered this and had any success in fixing it?

 

I have a Latitude E5400, which is the less-shiny version of the E6400 and also has the ALPS touchpad. I have never used a USB mouse with the device, so I have not found anything out of the ordinary with the touchpad.

My /proc/bus/input/devices does look a bit different from yours as mine enumerates the ALPS device as being specifically an ALPS device rather than a generic PS/2 mouse:

<snip>
I: Bus=0011 Vendor=0002 Product=0008 Version=7625
N: Name="AlpsPS/2 ALPS GlidePoint"
P: Phys=isa0060/serio1/input0
S: Sysfs=/devices/platform/i8042/serio1/input/input9
U: Uniq=
H: Handlers=mouse2 event9
B: EV=f
B: KEY=420 0 670000 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
B: REL=3
B: ABS=1000003

 

yea, I don't think you'd have much of an issue if you only used the touchpad, or only used an external mouse, but the sensitivity settings are different enough between the two that it makes it annoying.

 

Make sure you have your xorg.conf configured correctly to use the synaptics configuration tool, which you can read about in this post. And then try setting some synaptic configuration parameters in your xorg.conf, which you can read about in this post.

Good Luck..

 

I've done all of that, but I think the problem stems from the fact that the kernel just doesn't know what this touchpad is. It is an ALPS touchpad (and shows up as such in windows) but here in Linux all I get is 'ps/2 mouse' and 'macintosh mouse emulation'

 

You're right. That is the problem. It's showing up on different laptops, (I've got it with my EeePC), and most of the discussions indicate that it might need a kernel update before the touchpads are detected correctly. You could try appending the following to your kernel boot command line, and then see if your touchpad is detected correctly;

Code:

i8042.nomux=1

Regardless, the actual solution may require a kernel update.

Good Luck..

 

thanks for the advice, I'll give that a whirl tomorrow morning. If not, is there somewhere I can report this as a kernel issue?

 

You can follow up this issue best within the user forums of your specific distro, which you've already done. I imagine that when the relevant updated kernel is released, you'll hear about it when it gets rolled into a release for your distro.

BTW, if your distro has the updated xorg server and HAL components, (which F10 sounds like it does), make sure you remove all of the input entries, (touchpad, mouse, and keyboard), from your xorg.conf. It can sometimes conflict with the HAL policies. Also try reading this FedoraForum thread about configuring the Synaptics touchpad via the new HAL fdi policy configuration file.

Good Luck..

 

just an update on this...

I do have an xorg.conf file, but only because it was created by the Nvidia driver, however there are other entries in it. When removing them, x failed to start so I had to revert to the backup copy I created prior to removing the mouse entries. I did try the 10-synaptics.fdi modification with no luck.

I guess I'll just have to wait for a kernel update.