Sentelic Touchpad Linux drivers released under GNU GPL!

[flummoxed]

Users of the MSI Wind have been frustrated with the Sentelic touchpad, mainly because of the inability to disable to the tap-to-click. Sentelic has released their linux driver, in open source form.

Here is the link:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/fsp-lnxdrv/

I haven't tried them out yet, but it's promising that they've been released under the GPL!

[phil02]

Just in case some one with a Sentelic touchpad using Ubuntu comes across this thread, there is a discussion at this thread at the MSI wind forums about compiling and using the drivers on Ubuntu. There is also a bug opened to request the patch be added to Ubuntu's kernel.

[dash86no]

The sentelic driver is already in 10.04 lucid.
The problem, is that for whatever reason the "touchpad" tab does not appear on the mouse configuration menu.

The easiest way to disable tap to click using lucid, is to do the following:

sudo su
echo -n c > /sys/devices/platform/i8042/serio1/flags


tap to click will now be disabled. For some reason, this did not work for me when I tried sudo, hence the sudo su before executing the echo command.

Also, before running this command, it may be a good idea to run:

cat /sys/devices/platform/i8042/serio1/flags

and double check that all that's in there is a single "C". The capital C means tap to click is enabled, and a small "c" indicates that the tap to click feature is disabled.

The same principle can be applied to disable vertical scroll:

sudo su
echo -n 0 > /sys/devices/platform/i8042/serio1/vscroll

In this case, "1" means that vertical scroll is enabled, and "0" means disabled.

All this information can be found in the launchpad link above, but I wanted to add some details here in the hope that it may save somebody some time if they happen to come to this page when looking to turn off "tap to click" with a sentelic mousepad.

Cheers,

DA

[phil02]

I just upgraded to Lucid after a brief stop in Karmic. I had been holding off on Karmic because of the backlight cycling problem on the Wind.

fspc doesn't seem to work anymore. It gives errors about being able to load and save the configuration.

Your instructions on setting flags in /sys/devices/platform/i8042/serio1/ works but I can't figure out how to automate this since it needs sudo.

[sduensin]

Toss the commands in /etc/rc.local and they'll be executed on startup.

(Thanks for the information in this thread - I was going insane with the hscroll enabled!)

Scott

[mzecher]

Thanks a lot.

This information should be more documented and easier to find, such as in the wiki.

[CBR_Rob]

I just stumbled upon this after searching for quite a while to turn off the tap to click and to turn on the vertical scroll on my netbook. It sure has been a pain not having those changed over.

[Dawudd]

The Sentelic touchpad should be able to use the synaptics driver for all the features it provides: edge scrolling, disabling tapping while typing, and possibly even two-finger scrolling. This requires that the Sentelic driver be fixed. Sentelic caused this bad situation by removing support for absolute positioning from their driver. For anyone comfortable with compiling the kernel, adding this code back in and testing it is relatively easy. That is not I, but I thought I’d mention this on here, where there might be someone more capable than I. If anyone wants to help, users of Sentelic touchpads everywhere will be very grateful. See this bug report on Launchpad and this thread on the X.org support list.

Anyone want to help?

Thanks!

[Brett Lyons]

I've got sentelic touchpad hardware, and I am currently running a custom kernel I compiled myself sooo . . . Where would I find the code that needs to be tested?

~Brett

[Dawudd]

I've got sentelic touchpad hardware, and I am currently running a custom kernel I compiled myself sooo . . . Where would I find the code that needs to be tested?

See Éric’s comments in the short thread that I linked to before. He links to their source repository and tells you which file needs to be modified. Beyond that, I have no more information. You could also try e-mailing him yourself. He was extremely nice and helpful.