Over sensitive touchpad

English Hardware
1

I am trying to get my touchpad working once and for all. It is very over sensitive, and moves way too fast. I tried gsynaptics, and using it I can get the touchpad behaving properly, but after logging out and back in, the settings are lost. I was getting so frustrated that I decided to try using a generic usb mouse driver for th touchpad to see if that helped. However, sax2 (which lists the touch pad as an “ALPS touchpad”) gives me the following error when I try to test or save the new configuration:

Testing Configuration Failed:

For further information refer to the file /var/log/Xorg.99.log. The following report has been created from the calling instance:

SaX library: Success
X Configuration: Data incomplete in file /var/lib/sax/xorg.conf.
Undefined Screen "Py]<< " referenced by ServerLayout (null).

Sounds like a corrupt file somewhere. However, the /var/lib/sax/xorg.conf looks fine, not corruption anywhere that I can see. And the log file gives little help:

(II) RADEON(0): CAIL: CailReadATIRegister
(II) RADEON(0): CAIL: CailWriteATIRegister
(II) RADEON(0): CAIL: CailReleaseMemory
(II) RADEON(0): ParseTable said: CD_SUCCESS
(II) RADEON(0): Call to AtomBIOS Exec succeeded
Unblank CRTC 0 success
(II) RADEON(0): Disposing accel...
(II) RADEON(0): Disposing cursor info
(II) RADEON(0): Disposing DGA
(II) RADEON(0): Unmapping memory

I don’t know what else to try. Any ideas?

2

I am not sure whether you tried this already, but I reduced the sensitivity of my touchpad by changing the “AccelFactor” value in /etc/X11/xorg.conf manually.


Section "InputDevice"
    Identifier     "Mouse[3]"
    Driver         "synaptics"
    Option         "AccelFactor" "0.04"
...

The original value set by SAX2, in my case 0.1, had been way to high.

Note that the mouse acceleration of your desktop, e.g. KDE_System_Settings->Keyboard&Mouse->Advanced->PointerAcceleration,
also affects cursor speed. So I first determined the proper value for the KDE setting using all the USB Mice that I use (3 different ones) and then I fiddled with the settings for Touchpad and Touchstick in xorg.conf to get everything running smoothly.

3

If I am not …/sax/xorg.conf is a SaX specific file. I imagine that SaX uses it for generating a default /etx/X11/xorg.conf. Don’t worry, I know where xorg.conf is! :wink:

Turns out the ATI Catalyst driver had messed up my xorg.conf and SaX was choking on it. I fixed that and then changed the driver to synaptics. All is well.