disable tapping alps touchpad in breezy

[djjuice]

Any ideas how to accomplish this?
The patch for alps touchpads has already been applied in breezy since its using the 2.4.12 kernel. But the alps.readme states that disabling tapping is not really possible without applying this little patch thats not included in the original patch since its been known to cause errors. I read an older thread that pretty much re-compiled the 2.4.10 kernel but i don't need to appply patches since the .12 kernel has thes asforementioned. Has anyone have in solid steps or any way to disable tapping on an alps keypad?

[gila_monster]

Originally Posted by djjuice Any ideas how to accomplish this? The patch for alps touchpads has already been applied in breezy since its using the 2.4.12 kernel. But the alps.readme states that disabling tapping is not really possible without applying this little patch thats not included in the original patch since its been known to cause errors. I read an older thread that pretty much re-compiled the 2.4.10 kernel but i don't need to appply patches since the .12 kernel has thes asforementioned. Has anyone have in solid steps or any way to disable tapping on an alps keypad?

I don't have an alps touchpad, but I was able to disable tapping on my laptop by editing /etc/X11/xorg.conf thusly:

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Synaptics Touchpad"
Driver "synaptics"
Option "SendCoreEvents" "true"
Option "Device" "/dev/psaux"
Option "Protocol" "auto-dev"
Option "HorizScrollDelta" "0"
Option "MaxTapTime" "0"
EndSection

The important line is the one with MaxTapTime. If it's not there, add it. If it's there, make sure it's set to zero.

With luck, this will help you out.

Gila

[djjuice]

the maxtaptime option only applies to true synaptic touchpads, with an alps touchpad setting maxtaptime 0 and the deafult pointer/mouse setting has no effect.

[gila_monster]

Originally Posted by djjuice the maxtaptime option only applies to true synaptic touchpads, with an alps touchpad setting maxtaptime 0 and the deafult pointer/mouse setting has no effect.

Didn't realize that. Thanks for letting me know.

Gila

[William Szostak]

This has given me lots of trouble, too.
I have a Dell Inspiron 600m with an Alps touchpad.
Installed Ubuntu 5.10, and cannot disable tap-to-click.
Of course I set MaxTapTime to 0 in the xorg.conf file, but it doesn't work with Alps.

I've read everything on the web, most of which refers to older versions of the kernel and they all say you need to rebuild the kernel with the alps.patch. I read somewhere that the alps.patch was already included in the 2.6.12 kernel, but since I couldn't turn off the tap-to-click I thought maybe that was wrong. I installed the source and tried to apply the patch, but all patches were already applied.

I read the README.alps, and found the comment that disabling tapping will not work unless you also apply that patch that is shown in the readme. I copied this patch to a separate file and tried to apply it, but it failed. I suspect the code in the alps.c has changed since the readme was written so the patch no longer makes sense. Can anyone confirm this?

The xorg log shows that it is detecting the touchpad, and even shows the value of MaxTapTime as 0. But tap-to-click is still in effect.

I noticed that the xorg-driver-synaptics version is listed as "0.14.3+revertedto+0.13.6". Do I need version 0.14.3 to make this work? Does anyone know why it was reverted? I can't seem to force the package manager to install the 0.14.3 version. Do I need to go to the telia website to get this version? Does anyone know if something will break if I do this? (I'm just nervouse because it was "reverted".)

The touchpad basically works - it's just that the tap-to-click is way too sensitive and it ends up clicking on things when I'm just trying to move the cursor around the screen. Very infuriating! I never know what it's going to think I clicked on!

BTW, my USB mouse works fine, but I need the touchpad when working mobilely.

[makhand]

Bump!

Has anyone gotten their alps touchpad to be able to scroll vertically? I applied the patch in hoary. Do I have to do that again? I'm trying to configure a Dell Inspiron 8500. Is there a howto for this? Scrolling is pretty important to me. thanks!

[makhand]

Anyone with the know how to enable vertical scrolling with alps? this is for my girlfriend's laptop and she's getting pretty impatient.

[William Szostak]

I was finally able to get this working! I managed to turn off tapping, and the scrolling works, too.

To get this working, I had to install the 0.14.3 version of the Synaptics driver. Steps are outlined below.

Before you bother with the synaptics upgrade, you might want to try the following quick fix:

sudo sh -c "echo options psmouse proto=exps > /etc/modprobe.d/psmouse.modprobe"

Then reboot.
If this doesn't work, you can try proto=any and reboot again.
The above didn't do anything for me, but it worked for other people according to some of the forums I've read. If it works for you, great! If not, then do

sudo rm -f /etc/modprobe.d/psmouse.modprobe

and proceed with the following to upgrade your synaptics driver to 0.14.3.

1. In Synaptic Package Manager, install build-essential and libxext-dev.
2. Download the synaptics-0.14.3.tar.bz2.
3. Untar it:
   

   tar jxvf synaptics-0.14.3.tar.bz2

4. Download this patch: ubuntu-synaptics-0.14.3.patch.txt and save it into the synaptics-0.14.3 directory that you just untarred.
5. Cd to that directory and apply the patch:
   

   patch -p1 < ubuntu-synaptics-0.14.3.patch.txt

   (that's a number one following the -p)
   
6. (Note: with kernel 2.6.12, you do NOT need to apply the patches that are mentioned in the README.alps file)
7. Build the synaptics library:
   

   make

8. make a backup copy of the synaptics driver /usr/X11R6/lib/modules/input/synaptics_drv.o
9. Install the driver that you just built:
   

   sudo make install

10. Make a backup copy of your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file.
11. Change the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file to have settings that are appropriate for an Alps touchpad. The default file will make your cursor move really slowly. This attachment lists the settings from the relevent sections of my xorg.conf file (note: this is not the whole file, just the sections you'll want to change): xorg.conf.txt
12. Reboot.

I hope this works as well for others as it did for me. I spent a whole week searching the web and trying different solutions before stumbling on the above.

The following forums provided the info I needed:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=75094
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=75431
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=60494

Now that my touchpad isn't going crazy, I really like Ubuntu!

Good luck with your gf's laptop, makhand!

-William

[stoffe]

Haven't had the time to try this yet (laptop at other location) but if this works, this is something I hope will get into the repositories as soon as humanly possible. That's the single biggest annoyance I have when running Ubuntu on the laptop.

Thanks! =)

[makhand]

Originally Posted by William Szostak Good luck with your gf's laptop, makhand! -William

Hey thanks man. I'll give it a go. Everything seems to work fine in this department on my laptop (compaq), and i was really hoping it would just work on hers as well... but no such luck. I'll let you know how it turns out. This really should be included with the releases (if possible).