Touchpad not working at all

Hi, I recently installed openSUSE 11.3 on my laptop (SONYF1290S).

The touchpad doesn’t work at all. My USB mouse works.
I have installed gsynaptiks, but when I run the TouchPad in control center, it says

GSynaptics couldn’t initialize.
You have to set ‘SHMConfig’ ‘true’ in xorg.conf or XF86Config to use GSynaptics

I set SHMConfig to ‘true’ and ‘on’ xorg.conf and I tried editing the shmconfig.fdi (SynapticsTouchpad - Community Help Wiki), but both don’t work.

How can I get my touchpad to work? (I’m quite new to Linux)

To add to my above post:

The synaptics touchpad input device was added myself to xorg.conf.

Section “ServerLayout”
Identifier “Layout0”
Screen 0 “Screen0” 0 0
InputDevice “Keyboard0” “CoreKeyboard”
InputDevice “Mouse0” “CorePointer”
Option “Xinerama” “0”
InputDevice “Synaptics Touchpad”
EndSection

Section “InputDevice”
Identifier “Synaptics Touchpad”
Driver “synaptics”
Option “SendCoreEvents” “true”
Option “Device” “/dev/psaux”
Option “Protocol” “auto-dev”
Option “HorizScrollDelta” “0”
Option “SHMConfig” “true”
EndSection

Before getting into the issues of configuring the touchpad, you need to test if it is really detected or not.

hal-device | grep Touchpad

If you are not getting any output from the above command, your touchpad is not detected.

For recent versions of X, you don’t need xorg.conf. So, rename it.
In openSSUSE11.3, the configuration files from /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/ are used. Look for a file with the name 20-synaptics.conf there if you have a synaptics touchpad.

The hal-device has no output. How can I make Linux detect my touchpad?

I can find the 20-synaptics.conf file.

Have a look at the file /var/log/Xorg.0.log to see what is actually detected. You can user hal-device command but the output is pretty long.