ALPS Touchpad Configuration in Debian – April 09, 2009

After spending hours trying to get the HAL/FDI method to work, I resorted to modifying the xorg.conf directly, though I was able to only add a couple lines, since my current xorg.conf is basically empty, with everything being auto-detected.

The main difference that I wanted (from lots of other posted information) was that I liked the fdi method of configuring things (xorg.conf has always been a scary file to play with) and so I didn't want to have to hard-code everything, which means, as far as I could figure out, to not have a ServerLayout section at all since once I added that to get the touchpad to work properly, it broke everything else.

I saw one note in the xserver-xorg-input-synaptics Debian readme that mentioned that though the documentation talks about fdi files for the Synaptics/ALPS touchpad, it doesn't actually work yet.  Not sure why that is, nor why anyone would care about the configuration files (Debian currently ships an FDI file) if it doesn't actually do anything.

But, I am now happy with an unclickable touchpad!  Who would have thought that would have been so hard.  I also find it worthy of noting that there are tons of people (Windows, Mac, Linux) all trying to figure out how to disable the clicking - you'd think that could simply be the default, since I've never seen anyone who liked that option.

Here is what I added to /etc/x11/xorg.conf. I am not sure what the SHMConfig setting has to be set to true, since I am not running synclient (unless someone is doing that for me behind the scenes)

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier	"TouchPad"
Driver		"synaptics"
Option		"CorePointer"
Option		"SHMConfig"	"true"
Option		"MaxTapMove"	"0"
Option		"MaxTapTime"	"0"
EndSection