Synaptics touchpad issue

[hawk]

I am currently using a Mageia live USB disk created with Mandriva-Seed on a toshiba laptop with a synaptics touchpad. That all worked great and I really like Mageia, even installed it on the hard disk over Mandriva, but I'm having problems with the touchpad. The touchpad works great left-right, but is skipping (or sticking/locking) bad up-down, I can move the cursor across the screen with one quick swipe left-right, but it takes 5 swipes to go top to bottom. This same notebook/touchpad works flawlessly with Mandriva 9.x & 10.x and I can't find the problem. A USB mouse works great when I plug it in, and this issue doesn't seem to fit the symptoms of the 'psmouse' isssue I've read about.

The touchpad does incorporate a scroll area on the right and that does work as expected without error.

Anyone have any ideas ? Thanks ~ JP

Great work on the new Distro !

[isadora]

Very welcome to the Mageia-forum hawk!!!!

Sorry for the late response, and i even don't know, i can help you right away.
Anyhow, assuming you are a KDE-user, i would like to point you at "Touchpad settings" in KDE's "System settings".

[hawk]

Thanks Isadora,

No problem with response time, my problem can be overcome by using an external mouse most of the time. I am using KDE on this laptop, but I usually prefer a very minimal desktop and use blackbox0.7. I have gone into KDE's System Settings - Input Devices - Touchpad, In there I tried many combinations of switching on (or off) coasting, scrolling, tapping, etc., but nothing changed with the issue... except of course turning the touchpad completely off. I did notice however, that the Touch Sensitivity is opposite on this machine. If I slide the sensitivity to 'Low' it seems the same, and any setting near half, or any closer to 'High' give no cursor movement at all.

I also checked in the Mageia Control Center - Hardware - Browse and Configure Hardware. It seemed odd that I was showing 1 SynPS/2 Synaptics Touchpad and 2 entries for USB Optical Mouse (my external mouse), but Mandriva has the exact same hardware and it does work fine.

While writing this I stopped to try the touchpad several times and also get the 'right click' menu if I try to move the cursor with several quick swipes. If I move at a slow enough rate on the touchpad it seems fine, so it may be an issue with pointer acceleration.

[isadora]

Hawk,

There is only one other suggestion left, for as far i can overlook.
Try using "synclient" from Konsole/Terminal. It gives you an extensive range of settings, that can be tweaked.

Also read in this context:
http://wiki.zenwalk.org/index.php?title=Touchpad
and...
http://linux.die.net/man/1/synclient

Lots of good luck!!!

[hawk]

Isadora,

Thanks for the information and links, I will give it a try right away.

[hawk]

I didn't get anywhere with the information above, I tried running synclient -m and would give "Can't access shared memory area. SHMConfig disabled?", the required lines were in the xorg.conf, I never did get that problem resolved. Now I'm burned out fighting to get it to work... I'll try again at another time or day.

I re-installed Mageia to my hard disk so that it would be faster/easier to test different configurations. I looked through logs and found that the synaptics driver was actually trying to load twice, the second time would return errors for nearly all values and eventually would give "Preinit returned 11 for "SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad". I tried commenting out all of the lines in xorg.conf related to the touchpad, but got the same errors and nothing seemed to change the touchpad behavior. I tried IceWM, changing to XDM, then back to KDM, and nothing seemed to make any difference. Finially I have removed the synaptics driver completly and can use the touchpad as a basic mouse (no tapping / scrolling with the touchpad), and thats good enough I suppose.

Thanks ~

[doktor5000]

FWIW, i'll test the usage of syndaemon/synclient. Had the same problem a while back, but the difference is my laptop
gladly has an hardware button besides the touchpad to disable it. But i also remember a setting to disable touchpad while typing.
But i can only look after wednesday, ping me back if i'll forget to post.

[hawk]

I'm beginning to look at things a bit differently, I couldn't understand why I would be the only person having an issue... then I realized what was different. This particular notebook has a fingerprint scanner right between the mouse buttons for the touchpad. I'm thinking this touchpad has an odd print scanner added by OEM (Toshiba) that is probably rare and udev or hal is handling it differently. Mandriva 2011.2 is using synaptics driver 1.2.2 but Mageia is using 1.4.4, a newer driver that I assume is detecting and attempting to setup the fingerprint scanner. I copied the old (1.2.2) driver files over to Mageia, but that only caused other errors.

I forgot about the print scanner since I've never used it in Linux, I consider it wasted space.

The more I use Mageia... the more I like it, the subtle difference are a welcome change for me. I've been using Mandrake / Mandriva since version 7.2 in 2000, first Linux I purchase was Mandrake 8.0 and I love linux more each day. I was always worried about Mandriva's problems and that I might have to find a new distro.

Thanks for a great distro!!!

[doktor5000]

Maybe you could show lspci and lsusb output so that we get that problem with the fingerprint scanner sorted out?
About the other problem, maybe i misread some of your posts, it seems the vertical sensibility is really bad, is that correct?

I remember some posts from Colin Guthrie fiddling with some touchpad problems, also with synclient/syndaemon.

[hawk]

Doktor5000,

It really doesn't seem to be a sensitivity issue, but rather a glitch when moving. The pad always responds and starts moving the cursor, but shortly after moving a bit.. it freezes momentarily. I can move the cursor left - right with no problem, but if I move up - down too much while moving left - right I see it freeze. Sometimes the right click menu will pop-up while moving the cursor up - down.

Code: Select all

# lspci
00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile PM965/GM965/GL960 Memory Controller Hub (rev 03)
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Mobile GM965/GL960 Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 03)
00:02.1 Display controller: Intel Corporation Mobile GM965/GL960 Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 03)
00:1a.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI Controller #4 (rev 03)
00:1a.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI Controller #5 (rev 03)
00:1a.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller #2 (rev 03)
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) HD Audio Controller (rev 03)
00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) PCI Express Port 1 (rev 03)
00:1c.1 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) PCI Express Port 2 (rev 03)
00:1c.2 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) PCI Express Port 3 (rev 03)
00:1c.3 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) PCI Express Port 4 (rev 03)
00:1c.4 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) PCI Express Port 5 (rev 03)
00:1c.5 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) PCI Express Port 6 (rev 03)
00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI Controller #1 (rev 03)
00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI Controller #2 (rev 03)
00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB UHCI Controller #3 (rev 03)
00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller #1 (rev 03)
00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge (rev f3)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82801HEM (ICH8M) LPC Interface Controller (rev 03)
00:1f.1 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801HBM/HEM (ICH8M/ICH8M-E) IDE Controller (rev 03)
00:1f.2 SATA controller: Intel Corporation 82801HBM/HEM (ICH8M/ICH8M-E) SATA AHCI Controller (rev 03)
00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) SMBus Controller (rev 03)
07:00.0 Ethernet controller: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. 88E8040T PCI-E Fast Ethernet Controller (rev 12)
08:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 3945ABG [Golan] Network Connection (rev 02)
0a:01.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): O2 Micro, Inc. Firewire (IEEE 1394) (rev 02)
0a:01.2 SD Host controller: O2 Micro, Inc. Integrated MMC/SD Controller (rev 02)
0a:01.3 Mass storage controller: O2 Micro, Inc. Integrated MS/xD Controller (rev 01)

# lsusb
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 001 Device 002: ID 148f:3070 Ralink Technology, Corp. RT2870/RT3070 Wireless Adapter
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 002 Device 003: ID 04f2:b008 Chicony Electronics Co., Ltd USB 2.0 Camera
Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 003 Device 002: ID 0461:4d22 Primax Electronics, Ltd
Bus 004 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 005 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 005 Device 002: ID 08ff:1600 AuthenTec, Inc. AES1600
Bus 006 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 007 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub



Thanks for trying to help !