I was one the first people I knew to get a mobile phone (Motorola analogue flip!); but I was also one of the last to sign up for Googlemail. I am not a dedicated follower of fashion. I stand still and, sooner or later, fashion meets me coming round the other way. So, it might not come as a surprise that unlike the young turks of computing I came late to the mysteries of the ubiquitous Synaptics Touchpad. You see, I was weaned on that Faustian pact with Repetitive Strain Injury (RSI), the mouse. Having endured several very unpleasant encounters with various forms of RSI in the recent past, I decided to explore the alternative therapy of the touchpad. This article is an exploration of what you can be done with it in the GNU/Linux environment, its options, utilities, graphical front ends and command line options.

Synaptic Touchpad is not to be confused with Synaptic, the graphical front end to Apt-get, although you will be able to use that particular software package manager (or others) to install various utilities to exploit the potential of your latops’ touchpad. The first thing to do is to see exactly what you actually have installed, so fire up your terminal of choice and type the following:

cat /proc/bus/input/devices

Here is what I get on my Packard Bell EasyNote laptop running Mepis:

The output for an alps touchpad

The highlighted line indicates that my touchpad is an Alps touchpad. Take this one stage further and type this in a terminal:

cat /etc/X11/xorg.conf

And you can see the detailed output if you scroll down to the appropriate section (highlighted):

The output of xorg.config

To determine if the touchpad is configured, go back to the console and type grep Iden /etc/X11/xorg.conf. If this outputs the following with a reference to the Synaptics touchpad, then it is configured:

Is your touchpad configured?

Most users should find that their touchpad works out of the box, but with the caveat that it will be pretty basic. It will do exactly what it says on the tin—and that may not be very much. To get the best out of your touchpad—Alps or Synaptic—you will need to install the appropriate drivers and utilities to exploit mouse emulation, and then some.

Put your touchpad on steroids

To get the most out of a touchpad the most important thing you can do is to have a version of the Synaptic driver installed. If you are using the 2.6 Kernel, it will be installed by default. If not, you can download a compressed tarball of Synaptic. This is particularly important if you wish to run graphical front ends for touchpad such as ksynaptics, which will only work with version number 0.14.4 of the kernel module. You can check the version you are running by launching your software package manager and searching for the Synaptics driver. If you want a raw taste of what it can do, just type man synaptics in a console and view the output (you can also type that in the location bar of Konqueror for a neater HTML format for handy printing if you wish). Here is a list of advanced features you will have access to:

• Movement with adjustable, non-linear acceleration and speed
• Button events through short touching of the touchpad
• Double-Button events through double short touching of the touchpad
• Dragging through short touching and holding down the finger on the touchpad
• Middle and right button events on the upper and lower corner of the touchpad
• Vertical scrolling (button four and five events) through moving the finger on the right side of the touchpad
• The up/down button sends button four/five events
• Horizontal scrolling (button six and seven events) through moving the finger on the lower side of the touchpad
• The multi-buttons send button four/five events, and six/seven events for horizontal scrolling
• Adjustable finger detection
• Multifinger taps: two finger for middle button and three finger for right button events. (Needs hardware support. Not all models implement this feature.)
• Run-time configuration using shared memory. This means you can change parameter settings without restarting the X server

Depending on the firmware, some of these features may already work without the driver; also, features themselves may vary from touchpad to touchpad. To change the settings, you will need to edit your Xorg.conf, which is also really important: before you start to tinker with it you should back it up; so fire up your console and issue the following command (as root):

cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf_backup

And simply reverse that command to reinstall the backup if X fails to start: cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf_backup /etc/X11/xorg.conf.

Know what you’re doing

It is the rightful boast of GNU/Linux users that configuration files are relatively intuitive compared to the Satanic complexities of the Windows Registry

It is the rightful boast of GNU/Linux users that configuration files are relatively intuitive compared to the Satanic complexities of the Windows Registry. But when it comes to the Xorg file section dealing with touchpads, the myriad settings are not exactly obvious either. If you want to play around with them it is best to have some idea what they actually mean. The best guide and explanation I have found is here. It is very detailed and you should read it thoroughly before tinkering with the settings in the Xorg file. man xorg.conf is also very useful as a quick guide to the nomenclature of the file, particularly the boolean (true/false) values whose settings may mean the same thing but vary in their interchangeable terminology from distro to distro.