Alps touchpad driver for X-input (synaptics alternative)

Yotam Medini yotam.medini at gmail.com
Mon Oct 19 00:48:43 PDT 2009


Hello Peter,

Your arguments are valid.

The problems with the synaptics driver on my ancient UMax ActionBook are:

+ Using the touchpad, the cursor cannot reach parts of the screen,
  mainly the bottom. It may be fixed by smart configuration,
  but it is not easy to do for each operating system upfrade.

+ Using the touchpad, the cursor moves 'too quickly' and difficult to
  place into an exact pixel location.

+ On that slow and low memory machine, the driver seems to use too much
  resources.  That was another reason, I wanted to avoid dependencies 
  on 'finger movement speed' and floating point calculations.

+ On current Ubuntu, it is not easy to configure. The GSynapyics tool
  warns (and requires(?)) settings in /etc/X11/xorg.conf
  while current configuration happens under /usr/share/hal/fdi/...

regards -- yotam


On Mon, 19 Oct 2009 17:02:45 +1000
Peter Hutterer <peter.hutterer at who-t.net> wrote:

> I've only glanced over the code and I haven't really seen any reason why
> to have a new driver (other than that it's written in C++ instead of C).
> this driver seems to be (as you said) a severly cut down version of
> synaptics.
> 
> I think it's better though if you specify what the actual problems are so we
> can fix them. Another driver means more time spent on maintainership, bug
> triaging, user confusion, bug duplication, etc.


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