On Sun, 2008-12-07 at 20:46 -0500, Gene Heskett wrote: > I do my best to keep my thumbs away from that SOB, even using a > finger to tap the space bar when I'm composing an email, only to have > it do something off the wall cuz a finger or thumb got too close to > it. Mine does that, too, and it's bloody annoying. In prior releases I managed to EASILY disable touchpad tapping without disabling other touchpad features, and that solved the problem. For Fedora 9, I couldn't do so easily. Installing the obvious package to control (gsynaptics, since I use Gnome) it refused to do anything. The information about how to enable the package was lacking in useful details, i.e. *where* to put the extra settings into the xorg.conf file to get the SHMConfig enabling option to actually work. After making a bugzilla entry, which got cancelled for not really being a bug (I'm in two minds about that, because the package doesn't install itself in an operational way, and didn't provide enough information for you to manually enable it without the use of undocumented knowledge), I was left with information (on the final bugzilla entry) about how to disable my touchpad: 1. Reference the touchpad by adding "InputDevice "Synaptics Touchpad"" to the ServerLayout section. Which will allow me to use the gsynaptics program to twiddle my touchpad settings at will, and it's what I've done. But from time to time, in the middle of using the computer, it fails, and suddenly the mouse pointer has done something that it shouldn't do. Moments later, it's disabled again. And no amount of trying to abuse the touchpad will make it fail. 2. Add the options to the /usr/share/hal/fdi/policy/20thirdparty/10-synaptics.fdi file. This way you don't need an xorg.conf entry for the touchpad at all. Add each option in the form of <merge key="input.x11_options.TapButton1" type="string">0</merge> to the respective section (info.product is Synaptics Touchpad in your case) But this would completely disable it for all users, with no way for a particular user to enable it, and I didn't like that idea. My BIOS gives me options to have the touchpad working or not working, with no auto-disable option. It's a laptop, I might need to use the touchpad when I'm mobile, but I generally prefer to use a mouse, and it can be handy for page scrolling without scrabbling for the mouse. An auto-disable when there's a mouse would be perfect for me, but I can't see a way to do it on Linux. -- [tim@localhost ~]$ uname -r 2.6.27.5-41.fc9.i686 Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored. I read messages from the public lists. -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@xxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines
