I had to modify some of the values in the original script. My xorg.log shows that the statements are parsed correctly when the xserver starts, but for some reason they didnt have any effect in Ubuntu 9.10.įortunately the blogpost i mentioned before also shows a bash script to work around this problem. If you look closely at the above xml again, you will see that I put the corresponding lines right at the beginning of the file (and also the lines to enable two finger scrolling). This should be easy right? In a perfect world it would be.
Now all we have to do, is tell the driver to emulate “two finger mode” if the pressure value is over 70. You want to find a threshold that cleanly seperates operating with one finger from operating with two fingers. Try operating the touchpad with one or two fingers and see how the value changes. The “z” column represents the pressure value. The “f” column should report the number of fingers used on the touchpad, but unforatunately it always outputs “1” on my computer. Take a close look at the “f” and “z” columns. Synclient will give you a lot of information about your touchpad. fdi file for HAL which looks like this:Īfter restarting HAL and the xserver (or rebooting) one can start synclient with but my nf does no longer contain a device section for the touchpad as most of the hardware is handled by HAL now. The values output by the touchpad may vary between models, so it is best to start by debugging the touchpad output with synclient:įor this Option "SHMConfig" "true" must be set in the nf. Using the pressure value you can have the driver guess how many fingers you are probably using at the moment.
However it is somehow “pressure sensitive”.
The main problem here appears to be that the ALPS touchpad does not support two finger recognition. And this forum thread talks specifically about the ALPS touchpad which is built into my Dell Latitude E6400. This blogpost talks about setting up multi-touch scrolling for the Asus Eee 1005HA netbook and the process in general.
I had also found some very helpful sites that explain how to set it up for Ubuntu Karmic. Well a few minutes of googling later I had learned that this is indeed supported by Linux but not enabled by default in Ubuntu. Was bored today, lying on the couch with my notebook and wondering why Apple users get neat features like two finger scrolling and the linux crowd does not.