8.2.x, touchpads and papercuts

[Gary C Martin]

Hi Paul,

On 26 Nov 2009, at 13:45, Paul Fox wrote:

> i wrote:
>> martin wrote:
> ...
>>> 
>>> = 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.)
> 
> i forgot to also mention that i believe anyone using an XO-1 with
> a recent (last couple of months) 2.6.30 kernel, as provided with
> an F11-or-SoaS-on-XO-1 release, is already running this driver. 
> i haven't heard negative feedback from that group of users -- but
> i actually haven't gotten any feedback at all.  so maybe the new
> driver isn't an improvement at all.  or you're all using external
> mice.  :-)

Sorry for not pinging before on this, but I'm not noticing a significant change in trackpad behaviour (certainly does not seem to have deteriorated so could be a mild improvement). I need to sit down and do side by side comparisons while not being distracted by other tasks (just got back to Edinburgh tonight so I have a 0.82 XO-1 and F11-on-XO-1 handy again). A good test I used to try when the trackpad was being hacked on before was using Paint (same version) to draw spirals, you:

1) try to keep it reasonably tight
2) stop if you collide or get sloppy
3) count the number of cycles
4) try again N times
5) use the average cycles as a measure

Will give this a shot in the next few days.

Regards,
--Gary