timdoug's tidbits

2009-06-22

Getting an Elantech touchpad working in Debian squeeze (or: how to disable tap-to-click on an Eee 900HA)

Tap to click on a trackpad is a terrible idea. When I want to click, I'll hit the damn button myself, thank you very much. My ratio of unwanted to wanted tap-to-clicks is understandably undefined.

Three systems need to be configured for this to work: the kernel, the Xorg driver, and the X server itself.

The kernel
As documented here, recent kernels don't need to be patched; they just need CONFIG_MOUSE_PS2_ELANTECH enabled. Sadly, because of other issues the maintainers know about, it won't be enabled in mainline Debian kernels anytime soon. So either you'll have to build a kernel yourself, or just take the psmouse.ko I've created from 2.6.30, and pop it in the apropriate location in /lib/modules.
The Xorg driver
Debian testing ("squeeze" at time of writing) has an old version of xserver-xorg-input-synaptics that doesnt have the necessary Elantech patches. Unstable does, but pinning the binary has other dependencies that would pretty much require upgrading all of X, which I'd rather not do. So you can either pin the source file and build it yourself, or download and install the package I've made. Grab it here.

The X server
We just need to poke aorund xorg.conf a bit. What worked for me:

Section "InputDevice"
        Identifier      "Configured Mouse"
	Option		"CorePointer"
        Driver          "synaptics"
        Option          "Device"                "/dev/input/event10"
        Option          "Protocol"              "auto-dev"
        Option          "SHMConfig"             "true"
	Option		"MaxTapTime"		"0"
        Option          "VertTwoFingerScroll"   "1"
        Option          "HorizTwoFingerScroll"  "1"
EndSection

Good luck!

[/debian] permanent link

Running Debian testing on an Eee PC 900HA

Great news: almost everything works out of the box. I was concerned about hardware support, and struggling with wireless, so I just apt-pinned the latest kernel from unstable, and it works perfectly.

X11 at 1024x600, DRI
Sound
Ethernet
Touchpad w/ two-finger scrolling (although with annoying-as-hell tap to click -- more on that later)
Wireless
Camera (w/ Skype)
Suspend to RAM

Protip: make sure to modprobe acpi-cpufreq for frequency scaling.

I'm using evilwm as my window manager, because I love how it gets out of my way and lets me do my work. I'd post a screenshot, but there's no eye-candy to show off... =) I've also had to hack Firefox into shape so it doesn't take up silly amounts of vertical pixels.

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