Talk:Synaptics TouchPad driver for X

I prefer use the trackpoint instead of the touchpad for pointer movement but find the horizontal/vertical scrolling using the right/bottom edges of the touchpad useful. I have configured my touchpad so that its entire area is scrollable by changing the edge coordinates in my xorg.conf. Now I can can control the pointer with the trackpoint and scroll windows horizontally and vertically at the same time by dragging my thumb around anywhere on the touchpad, like a 2-axis scrollwheel or a scrollball. Unfortunately, these settings seem to get lost when resuming from hibernation (suspend2) but there is no problem when using sleep/suspend to ram.

My xorg.conf Touchpad config section:

 Section "InputDevice"
         Identifier      "Synaptics Touchpad"
         Driver          "synaptics"
         Option          "SendCoreEvents"        "true"
         Option          "Device"                "/dev/psaux"
         Option          "Protocol"              "auto-dev"
         Option          "SHMConfig"             "on"
         # Set up a very small touchpad area so that the up/down
         # and left/right scrolling areas take up the entire
         # touchpad.  This makes it possible to use the entire
         # touchpad for scrolling and the superior trackpoint 
         # for cursor movement ;)
         Option          "UpDownScrolling"       "1"
         Option          "LeftRightScrolling"    "1"
         Option          "LeftEdge"              "0"
         Option          "RightEdge"             "1"
         Option          "TopEdge"               "0"
         Option          "BottomEdge"            "1"
         Option          "TapButton1"            "0"
         Option          "TapButton2"            "0"
         Option          "TapButton3"            "0"
         # The above non-standard settings for the edges
         # causes some odd tapping behavior so turn
         # off all corner button options.
         Option          "RTCornerButton"        "0"
         Option          "RBCornerButton"        "0"
         Option          "LTCornerButton"        "0"
         Option          "RBCornerButton"        "0"
 EndSection

Configuration for newer xorg

With the newer xorg (>= 1.7.3) on Debian, there appears to be a problem that the touchpad is detected but 'synclient -l' does not work.

A solution that I found is to have file called (say) /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/10-thinkpad.conf which contains:

Section "InputClass"
        Identifier      "Trackpoint"
        MatchProduct    "SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad"
        Driver          "synaptics"
        Option          "AutoServerLayout"      "true"
        Option          "GuestMouse"            "true"
EndSection

Section "InputClass"
        Identifier      "Trackpoint"
        MatchProduct    "TPPS/2 IBM TrackPoint"
        Option          "AutoServerLayout"      "true"
        Option          "EmulateWheel"          "true"
        Option          "EmulateWheelButton"    "2"
        Option          "Emulate3Buttons"       "false"
        Option          "XAxisMapping"          "6 7"
        Option          "YAxisMapping"          "4 5"
EndSection

GPointing Device Settings

• The gsynaptic web page says the following: GSynaptics will be obsolete. Please try GPointing Device Settings.
• The package in Ubuntu Maverick is gpointing-device-settings
• Don't know if the choice to leave the older software in this article was intentional but...
• I'm happy to report that GPointing Device Settings works awesome on t410s, including middle mouse button (button 2) scrolling (while retaining unix clipboard paste).