Doublehops

I bought my first Mac several months ago because I travel around the city a lot I wanted something smaller than my older 15 inch laptop. I used Macosx on it for sometime but found development too difficult. I guess I’ve been using Linux for so long now that I am so intune with the way it works, I was lost without it. My two main gripes was no good (from limited effort trying homebrew) package managers and less than ideal window manager. I realised more than ever how much I need Aptitude and Fluxbox to be productive.

So I installed Kubuntu 11.04 and felt at home again. However there were some things that didn’t work they way I needed them to. The touchpad is great and I could never go back to a system that doesn’t have one but with Linux it was way too sensitive. As someone else on the web pointed out, you could move the mouse without actually touching the device. This made typing emails and most typing tasks a real pain because the cursor would jump all over the place. However thanks to Texstar’s post I was able to correct this. I went with solution 4. I found that setting FingerHigh to a value of 50 was better than the recommended 30. Also on another forum I found an option to detect if your palm has brushed the touchpad and ignore the action.

My config now looks like this: /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/50-synaptics.conf

Section "InputClass"
    Identifier "touchpad catchall"
        Driver "synaptics"
        MatchIsTouchpad "on"
        MatchDevicePath "/dev/input/event*"
        #Option  "Device"        "/dev/input/mouse0"
        Option  "Protocol"      "auto-dev"
        #Option  "LeftEdge"      "1700"
        #Option  "RightEdge"     "5300"
        #Option  "TopEdge"       "1700"
        #Option  "BottomEdge"    "4200"
        Option  "FingerLow"     "25"
        Option  "FingerHigh"    "50"
        Option  "MaxTapTime"    "180"
        Option  "MaxTapMove"    "220"
        Option  "VertScrollDelta" "30"
        Option  "MinSpeed"      "1.48"
        Option  "MaxSpeed"      "2.00"
        Option  "AccelFactor" "0.3830"
        Option  "SHMConfig"     "1"
        Option  "VertTwoFingerScroll"   "1"
        Option  "HorizTwoFingerScroll"  "1"
        Option  "VertEdgeScroll"        "1"
        Option  "HorizEdgeScroll"       "1"
        Option  "TapButton1"            "1"
        Option  "TapButton2"            "3"
        Option  "TapButton3"            "2"
        Option  "PalmDetect"            "1"
EndSection

These settings can also be changed on the fly using synclient.

synclient FingerHigh=40

I found that this set-up helped a lot getting the mouse gestures in Firefox to respond better. Now I’m just waiting on the development of a native driver for the wireless card.

Update: The option that makes the biggest improvement is the PalmDetect. Setting this to 1 stops the touchpad from reacting when you’re plan slides across. The other settings should then be tweaked to suit your needs.