8.2.x, touchpads and papercuts

[Paul Fox]

martin wrote:
 > 
 > We are both trolling.

teach a man to fish, and...  :-)

 > Now - changing to productive topics... give me
 > some things we can do on a 8.2.2 release for the 2 groups of users I
 > mention:
 > 
 > = CL1 Alps users
 >   - better kmod?
 >   - pgf proposed an xset command to tweak responsiveness?

both of the above points are covered here:
    http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Touchpad_driver_changes
folks in the field in both rwanda and paraguay have done some
testings.  we would love to get more feedback from anyone having
CL1 (i.e., "original") touchpad issues regularly, to let us know
if this is enough better to be worth deploying.  i/we believe it
is, but it's been quite difficult to get good feedback.

there's an rpm here:
    http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Touchpad_driver_changes#Trial_Kernel_with_new_driver
(it's inside the tarball, along with a script that applies the
mouse accelleration change.)

 > 
 > = CL1A "New touchpad" users
 >  - split off psmouse kmod?
 >  - kmod or xorg option to disable tapping?

when we first got the new CL1A touchpads, and enabled the
synaptics protocol in the psmouse driver, it didn't work very
well at all.  we were under release pressure, so we disabled that
support in the kernel, until another day.  daniel recently
pointed out to me that we could build in the synaptics protocol,
but explicitly not choose it (i.e., override auto-detection) by
using a module parameter.  this would let deployments and others
experiment with ways to make tap-to-click go away while keeping
everything else working.  i believe the full solution will
require changes in addition to kernel work -- configuration of
the driver and X, and possibly changes to the X11 driver.  (note
that we have the same issue on XO-1.5 laptops, which all have
CL1A touchpads.  the issue is being tracked in #9101.

i did propose splitting off the psmouse module, so that it could
be released independently of the kernel.  i still think this is
probably the right thing to do, though not necessary -- it's always
possible to build and install a full kernel RPM.

paul
=---------------------
 paul fox, pgf at laptop.org