Touchpad Problem

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Hi all!

I have a new-to-me (i.e., used) laptop and am having a problem making the touchpad behave.

It is an old HP Elitebook 8530p, and I THINK it has a synaptics touchpad. But I don’t remember how to get more specifics than that on Linux, lspci, lsusb and lshw don’t tell me anything helpful. lsmod doesn’t list anything containing “syn” or “synaptics”.

Anyway, I’ve installed C7 on the laptop and pretty much everything works just as I expect it to, but even though I configure the touchpad for two-finger-scrolling, it simply won’t do it. It also won’t do edge-scrolling, and it has a mark along the right side of the pad that seemingly implies it should do edge-scrolling.

If I could figure out which synaptics touchpad it is I might be able to find out if it does or does not support two-finger scrolling
(like both my netbooks do).

Can any of you remind me how to find out the Synaptics model it is, and/or figure out if it would be expected (or not) to support two-
finger scrolling?

Any advice will be appreciated, thanks in advance!

Fred

4 thoughts on - Touchpad Problem

  • looking in dmesg output for subsets of that I find:

    3.417773] input: SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad as /devices/platform/i8042/serio4/input/input5

    and

    [ 3.090864] psmouse serio4: synaptics: queried max coordinates: x [..5694], y [..5048]
    [ 3.121691] psmouse serio4: synaptics: Touchpad model: 1, fw: 7.0, id: 0x1c0b1, caps: 0xd44791/0xb00000/0x20000, board id: 0, fw id: 504136
    [ 3.121698] psmouse serio4: synaptics: serio: Synaptics pass-through port at isa0060/serio4/input0

    and

    [ 6.646764] psmouse serio5: alps: Unknown ALPS touchpad: E7=10 00 64, EC=10 00 64

    all of which I take to mean it is an alps touchpad that is synaptics compatible. Any pointers on how to figure out what its capabilities are? (other than just trusting the synaptics driver to figure it out, which I’ve already tried but don’t like the result).

    I’ve googled for some of those values, but didn’t turn up anything meaningful (to me).

  • Hmmm… interesting!

    looking at the MATE section (since I run the MATE desktop), I do the two dconf-editor settings listed there.

    then I do (skipping a step or two in what I show here):

    xinput list-props “SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad” | grep Capabilities Synaptics Capabilities (324): 1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 1, 1

    which reports :

    From left to right, this shows:

    1: device has a physical left button
    1: device does not have a physical middle button
    1: device has a physical right button
    0: device does not support two-finger detection
    0: device does not support three-finger detection
    1: device can configure vertical resolution
    1: device can configure horizontal resolution

    where the two zeroes indicate 2 and 3-finger operations do not seem to be supported.

    Since The Main Thing I would like to have that I cannot get working are two-finger horiz/vert scrolling, this seems to say that the device does not recognize (and never will) that feature. Even though the Mate touchpad settings show they are enabled, as does synclient.

    My thought on this is: :-( :-( :-( :-( :-( :-(

    Sigh.

    I guess that since the laptop was free, I shouldn’t complain.

    Thanks for the pointer!

    Fred