Rodo Abad

If you have a laptop and you use the touchpad a lot then you know that if you have a heavy hand then the tapping option being enabled now (After the YUM update) is a huge pain in the ass. I absolutely hate it, I loved it when it was broken on a fresh install of Fedora 9 but now that it’s fixed after the latest YUM update it is again ‘trying’ to bug me. Good thing I know how to turn it off.

You can do it the easy way via gsynaptics which starts up a GUI for Synaptics.

yum install gsynaptics

If everything worked out well then when you go to System > Preferences > Hardware, you will be able to see a new app called Touchpad.

However if you get this message.

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

Then you didn’t setup your /etc/X11/xorg.conf right. Now there might be other configs out there that will make it work too that are different than mine, but this is the one that worked so me and so I’ll post it.

Go to your command line and logged in as root through su - (I prefer this method than sudo).

Then either use vi, vim, or in this case I used gedit since there’s a lot of lines to be copied.

So type…

gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Now it should open up xorg.conf and you’ll see a bunch of text…

Look for the one that says Section “ServerLayout” and then add InputDevice   “TouchPad” “CorePointer”.

It should end up like this except that sometimes you may or may not have some of the options that I have. In which case all we want right now is the InputDevice   “TouchPad” “CorePointer” to be in there.

Section "ServerLayout"
	Identifier      "Default Layout"
	Screen      0   "Screen0" 0 0
	InputDevice	"Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"
	InputDevice	"TouchPad" "CorePointer"
EndSection

After that, you can now go ahead and add the Synaptics config.

Section "InputDevice"
	Driver "Synaptics"
	Identifier "TouchPad"
	Option "SendCoreEvents"
	Option "Protocol" "auto-dev"
	Option "SHMConfig" "on"
	Option "TapButton1" "1"
	Option "TapButton2" "2"
	Option "MaxTapTime" "0"
EndSection

Take note that I already disabled tapping on that config. You can still enable/disable it via Gsynaptics.

When all is well, reboot just to be sure that everything is loaded properly. Gsynaptics should be working now and you and your tapping problems should be gone!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 1st, 2008 at 3:26 AM and is filed under GNU/Linux. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.