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Synaptics Touchpad Driver

Bill Moss
November 1, 2004

Introduction

Touchpad driver settings seems to be highly personal. I am probably out of the mainstream in this regard. I do not like to use either the tapping feature or the scrolling feature so being able to disable these features is an advantage. The application synclient that comes with the drive makes it easy to experiment with various settings.

Installing the Driver

For Fedora Core 2, download

  synaptics-0.13.5-5.i386.rpm

from

  ftp://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/
        development/i386/Fedora/RPMS/

and install. Edit the file

  /etc/X11/xorg.conf

as indicated in

  /usr/share/doc/synaptics-0.13.5-5/INSTALL

and reboot. This is the only setup that is required.

Configuration

Use the command.

  synclient -l

to get a listing of the default settings.

  Parameter settings:
    LeftEdge             = 1700
    RightEdge            = 5300
    TopEdge              = 1700
    BottomEdge           = 4200
    FingerLow            = 25
    FingerHigh           = 30
    MaxTapTime           = 180
    MaxTapMove           = 220
    MaxDoubleTapTime     = 180
    ClickTime            = 100
    EmulateMidButtonTime = 75
    VertScrollDelta      = 100
    HorizScrollDelta     = 100
    MinSpeed             = 0.06
    MaxSpeed             = 0.12
    AccelFactor          = 0.0010
    EdgeMotionMinZ       = 30
    EdgeMotionMaxZ       = 160
    EdgeMotionMinSpeed   = 1
    EdgeMotionMaxSpeed   = 200
    EdgeMotionUseAlways  = 0
    UpDownScrolling      = 1
    TouchpadOff          = 0
    GuestMouseOff        = 0
    LockedDrags          = 0
    RTCornerButton       = 2
    RBCornerButton       = 3
    LTCornerButton       = 0
    LBCornerButton       = 0
    TapButton1           = 1
    TapButton2           = 2
    TapButton3           = 3
    CircularScrolling    = 0
    CircScrollDelta      = 0.1
    CircScrollTrigger    = 0
    CircularPad          = 0

I changed several of the default settings. The best approach is to experiment with various settings and then hardwire the changes in /etc/X11/xorg.conf. Here are the changes I experimented with. The first three changes disable scrolling on the right edge, scrolling on the bottom edge, and tapping.

   synclient RightEdge=6000
   synclient BottomEdge=5000
   synclient MaxTapTime=0
   synclient MinSpeed=0.02
   synclient MaxSpeed=0.18