Tweaking Synaptics Touchpad

Synaptics makes excellent touchpads: they are responsive, multi-touch and, most importantly, they can be long and tediously easy and simple to adjust to their deft fingers.

Here is just one bad luck: all this beauty works fine in Windows 7, while in Linux, as always, only dull bits, and half do not use all their capabilities.

Fearless Habrayuzer, are you ready to fight universal injustice? Then welcome to habrakat, waiting for you a lot of fun, linux-way and millions of happy clicks on the output :)
')
In fact, you need to: download the script , tweak it for yourself and add to autoload. Really boring? Read on :)

Problem

About a year ago, having bought a beautiful Acer 3810T and having enjoyed plenty of playing with Win 7, I gladly switched to Ubuntu.
Unfortunately, the "iron" problems have increased, but they somehow solved the campaign (see ubuntuforums ).
However, most of all (especially in comparison with the smooth work in Win 7) I was annoyed by the touchpad operation, namely:

1. in some cases insufficient, and in others excessive sensitivity
2. Bouncing cursor
3. lack of multitouch
4. the inability to properly set it all up

What to do with it? Let's see what standard programs offer us, for example, in Ubuntu.

Standard solutions

There are 2 simplest solutions to this problem: setting the mouse through Mouse Preferences in Gnome and the program gSynaptics. In the first case of settings, the cat wept (turn off the touchpad when typing and allow horizontal scrolling? Cool!). gSynaptcs also solves only some of the problems (there is circular scrolling, an attempt to adjust the cursor movement and sensitivity), but by the way, it works quite crookedly and for some reason does not remember all configs. So all this is not that kind of mouth .

However, enough of the lyrics and drama. We turn to the most interesting!

Solution to the problem

Sweetie

In fact, Synaptics offers the same “make ah%? №№ 0” button a special package with which you can implement multitouch in most popular distributions, but only for OEM manufacturers and meinteiners. Perhaps happiness awaits us in the near future, but we do not like to wait and go on our own (so far the only) way.

I will make a reservation right away: the solution and the config is considered in the framework of Ubuntu . No, not at all because " this is the best operating system in the world ." I just use it :) To everyone who tests in other distributions and accomplishes, whores and blackjack a special thank you!

The essence of the solution in writing a script, which, through the standard xinput utility , each time the system is booted, will change the settings of the Synaptics driver for X, the way we want it.

** Solutions found in google operate on xorg.conf and HAL, which is successfully cut from Ubuntu 10.04

Process

1. Check if xinput package is installed
2. Check if the xserver-xorg-input-synaptics package is installed
3. Create your own script with settings or use my
** I remind you that our scripts usually have the .sh extension in their name, start with the line #! / Bin / sh and like to be made executable with the help of the chmod command
4. We change the driver settings in the script
5. Add the script to autoload (in any convenient way)

How do the lines of the script?

xinput --help

Excellent console utility that allows you to change the settings of input devices on the fly.

To view a list of all devices:
xinput list
Further, to see the list of parameters of a specific device and their values, you need to refer to it by name or id number (better by name, when it is already known):
xinput list-props "SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad"
To change the value of a specific parameter:
xinput set-int-prop "SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad" " " # () # # #
For example:
xinput set-int-prop "SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad" "Synaptics Jumpy Cursor Threshold" 32 250
- solves the problem of "jumping" cursor
xinput set-int-prop "SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad" "Circular Scrolling" 8 1
- allows scrolling "in a circle"

Details about each parameter on the site X.org

In a primitive script, you can see which parameters I used. But, as you know, the taste and color ...
Download script
Well, it seems everyone is happy and happy. Now you can safely draw in Photoshop GIMP;)
This configuration algorithm should work not only for Ubuntu and, perhaps, also for other touchpads, you should try;)

Unfortunately, I do not know how to set up a multitouch function such as scale and rotate. Maybe someone will tell? If you have something to add / correct, welcome to the comments.

UPD: Thanks for the suggestions and wishes, we take into account in the future!

UPD2: Where are you handsome coder on his typewriter-horse, which will make a small utility for those for whom, say Ubuntu - OS is really for human beings?