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Home » How To: Setting up Touchpad on a Laptop - A Complete Guide

How To: Setting up Touchpad on a Laptop - A Complete Guide -- page 5

5. How to use the advanced feature of your Touchpad:

Zones on a Synaptics touchpadHere is a sketch of a basic touchpad (touchpad + left and right mouse button)

As you can see, there is 9 zones on your touchpad called:

  • Left Edge (1,4,7)

  • Right Edge (3,6,9)

  • Top Edge (1,2,3)

  • Bottom Edge (7,8,9)

Okie, now let'see what you can do with your touchpad. As before, you can move your mouse pointer around, but in addition, you can:

  • Simple Click by tapping once the touchpad

  • Double Click by tapping twice on the touchpad

  • Right Click by tapping once around area 9 on the touchpad

  • Middle Click by tapping once around area 3 on the touchpad

  • Vertical Scrolling by moving your finger from area 3 to 9 for downward scrolling and area 9 to 3 for upward scrolling

  • Horizontal scrolling by moving your finger on the touchpad from area 7 to 9 (scroll to the right) or 9 to 7 (scroll to the left)

  • Dragging by tapping the touchpad once and then holding your finger on the touchpad and moving around

  • Configure your touchpad during run-time by using synclient (this will be covered in another article), note that to enable this feature, you need to declare Option "SHMConfig" "on" in xorg.conf

Basically, you don't need anymore the two buttons from the touchpad as you can do every action a full featured mouse will offer (but still, this is not as confortable to use as a real mouse is.... you definitely won't play games with this :) ).

6. Conclusion:

This tutorial went throught every step to get a fully operating touchpad with all features enable.

You might want to set parameters such as MinSpeed, MaxSpeed, AccelFactor ... to your need and feeling but the default settings given should be fine for most users.

7. Links:

Synaptics Touchpad driver for Xorg/XFree86

Qsynaptics : X11 touch pad driver configuration utility based on QT

Gsynaptics : A GTK utility to configure your touchpad

Table of Content:
Setting up Touchpad on a Laptop: Introduction
Setting up Touchpad on a Laptop: Installation
Setting up Touchpad on a Laptop: Configuration
Setting up Touchpad on a Laptop: Explanation

‹ How To: Setting up Touchpad on a Laptop - A Complete Guide -- page 4up
Submitted by chantra on Sun, 2006-06-18 08:55.

Editting Area Functions

Submitted by nate (not verified) on Sat, 2007-01-27 16:54.

Hello,

Thanks for this excellent write up, worked great!

Is it possible to edit the functions of the different areas of the touchpad?

For example, can area 7 act as a middle click and area 3 act as a right click?

Thanks and have a good one,

Nate

Figured it out

Submitted by Nate (not verified) on Sat, 2007-01-27 19:09.

I found a web page that described all of the directives here:

http://www.die.net/doc/linux/man/man5/synaptics.5.html

using this info, i added the lines:

Option "RTCornerButton" "3"
Option "LBCornerButton" "2"
Option "RBCornerButton" "0"

to xorg.conf along with the other options defined int he tutorial.

This set the right top (RT) corner to right click (3), left bottom to middle, and right bottom to nothing.

Again thanks for the tutorial, it got me going in the right direction!

Maybe

Submitted by chantra on Sat, 2007-01-27 18:57.

Yeah, it should be. Try adding:

Option          "LBCornerButton"        "1"
Option          "RTCornerButton"        "3"

Which means:
LBCornerButton (Left Bottom Corner Button) 1 (Left Click)
RTCornerButton 2 (Right Top Corner Button) 3 (Right Click)
Debuntu

thanks!

Submitted by Nate (not verified) on Sat, 2007-01-27 19:11.

thanks for the quick reply!

that's exactly what i found, and it works!

this tutorial is awesome as

Submitted by Zac (not verified) on Thu, 2007-01-25 23:09.

this tutorial is awesome
as a newbie to linux it was easy to follow and now my synaptics mouse is fully working... this site needs to be linked in ubuntu forums so that others can benefit from this
Thanks heaps :P

Synaptics touchpad stopped working after trying this

Submitted by greew (not verified) on Sun, 2006-10-29 07:53.

Hi,

I used your guide to get a more flexible touchpad, but after using your guide on my Kubuntu Edgy, my touchpad stopped working.

I don't know how or why, but it's quite annoying!

Regards,
Jesper


some hints

Submitted by chantra on Tue, 2006-10-31 15:58.

Hi Jesper,
I'm sorry it didn't work out of the box.
There might be many reason why it didn't work out.

  1. Is the Identifier name of your synaptic InputDevice reported in the ServerLayout section?
  2. Did you check if it is a synaptics or alp device?

You might check out your /var/log/Xorg.0.log file as well to get some hints of what is going wrong.
Hope this helps,

Debuntu


Hi, I add the same problem

Submitted by isenalim (not verified) on Sun, 2007-02-18 15:43.

Hi,
I add the same problem as Jesper. The problem has been solved adding the line

Option "SendCoreEvents" "true"

which was in the original xorg.conf but not in the one you suggested.

I have instead a weird problem. When I login to gnome the touchpad is not working properly: no central button on zone 3, no scrolling. But if I do Ctrl+Alt+Backspace and login again everything work perfectly!

Any suggestion?
Ciao