USB synaptics touchpad

[Paul Vojta]

On Mon, Jan 28, 2008 at 04:41:59PM -0500, Stefan Monnier wrote:
> I have an USB "UltraNav" thinkpad keyboard which is basically a USB hub
> to which are connected a keyboard, a trackpoint, a touchpad, and
> 2 low-speed USB connectors (one of which is used for my mouse).
> 
> The touchpad by defaults emulates a mouse, so it "works", but I'd like
> to play with the synaptics tweaks such as multi-finger movements and
> scrolling.  In the Xorg-1.3 server I use (from Debian testing), it seems
> this simply doesn't work, unless I install a syntaptics-usb
> kernel module.  Using that module, I can get my touchpad to be
> recognized by the Xorg synpatics driver, but this doesn't survive
> unplug&replug.  Now I don't often unplug&replug my keyboard, but I do
> hibernate my machine and that's treated in much the same way, so the end
> result is that after sleep&wakeup the touchpad again isn't recognized by
> the Xserver.
> 
> I wonder how this is *supposed* to work (now or ideally in the future):
> - is a synaptics-usb driver the right way to go, or should the Xorg driver
>   natively support synaptics-over-USB?
> - how is the hotplug supposed to work?  Is it a missing feature in the
>   Xorg-synaptics driver, or a bug in the synaptics-usb driver?

I don't know much about hotplug in X, but probably the first thing to look
at is whether the kernel knows about the touchpad.  I.e., if you type the
command "cat /sys/class/input/event*/device/name", is there a line mentioning
Synaptics in it?  Try that test with and without the synaptics-usb driver,
and try it after suspend/resume.

--Paul Vojta, vojta at math.berkeley.edu