The XFree86 Synaptics touchpad driver is the coolest thing I’ve seen in ages. It changes the action of the touchpad on a laptop so that dragging a finger down the right-hand edge works like a mousewheel, a two-finger tap works as the middle button, tapping in the corners works as a middle or a right-click, and loads of other cool stuff. Even better, you can adjust the sensitivity of the pad to clicks; no more does lghtly brushing the pad by accident act as a mouse click! Have Windows people had this for ages and I just didn’t know about it? It’s a shame that Ubuntu doesn’t install it by default; it’s in Debian (and Ubuntu) but it requires hand-hacking the XF86Config file.
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Comments
Colin Watson
sil
Mysterious. It was installed, but it hadn’t configured my XF86Config-4 as README.Debian dictates. Don’t know why; where should I look? Problem now is that I don’t have any other laptops and I don’t want to reinstall that one; it works ;)
Gobo
Synaptics actually offers a win driver with comparable features, but I also first got the XFree driver and don’t want to miss it.
Hm. We’ve had at least a couple of reports recently saying that the Synaptics driver “just worked” in Ubuntu. Don’t know what versions of stuff are required, though.