[SOLVED] New kernel driver for the BCM5974 touchpad (Macbook Air, Penryn)

[kosumi68]

UPDATED 25OCT2008

Apple USB BCM5974 (Macbook Air and Penryn Macbook Pro) multitouch driver

This driver adds support for the multitouch trackpad on the new
Apple Macbook Air and Macbook Pro Penryn laptops. It replaces the
appletouch driver on those computers, and integrates well with the
synaptics driver of the Xorg system.

Known to work on Macbook Air, Macbook Pro Penryn and the new Unibody
Macbook 5 and Macbook Pro 5.

Support for the latest Macbooks is not upstream yet, but available in the mactel PPA.
Make sure you have these lines in /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/mactel-support/ubuntu intrepid main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/mactel-support/ubuntu intrepid main

When changing /etc/apt/sources.list, one needs to update:

sudo apt-get update

With the mactel PPA in place, install the bcm5974-dkms package

sudo apt-get install bcm5974-dkms

Enjoy!

For more information or troubleshooting, see http://bitmath.org/code/bcm5974-dkms/

Credit for finding out how to initialize the trackpad goes to Scott Shawcroft and the touchd user-space driver.