Right Click and Other Settings on Touchpad

I thought I'd post some stuff I found out. Like many people, I didn't like the touchpad buttons on the AAO. I wanted to be able to do left or right clicks by hitting the touchpad. I set up these settings in the xorg.conf. Here's a basic guide:

1. Edit /etc/x11/xorg.conf
Hit alt-F2. On linpus type sudo mousepad /etc/X11/xorg.conf on most other systems, type sudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf.

2. Change the settins for the touchpad. Here's an example with my settings:

Code:

Section "InputDevice"
	Identifier	"Synaptics Touchpad"
	Driver		"synaptics"
	Option		"SHMConfig"		"true"		# Allows cool debug software
	Option		"SendCoreEvents"	"true"
	Option		"Device"		"/dev/psaux"
	Option		"Protocol"		"auto-dev"
	Option		"HorizEdgeScroll"	"0"		# Scroll left right by sliding finger
								# Along bottom of touchpad
        Option		"CircularScrolling"	"On"            # iPod-style circle scroll
	Option		"CircScrollTrigger"	"8"             # Trigger by tapping upper left
	Option		"RTCornerButton"	"3"             # Treat right corner as right mouse button
	Option		"RightEdge"		"4750"          # These two settings expand the 'top right'
        Option		"TopEdge"		"2750"          # area to something I can reliably hit.
EndSection

3. Save the file. See the changes by rebooting or hitting cntrl-alt-backspace to restart just X.

Notes:
If you want to know what all these settings are, open up a terminal window and type "man synaptics"

The SHMConfig setting allows you to control the touchpad with nice gui programs, like the gsynaptics that configures the touchpad for Linux. It also lets you run a cool analysis program called "synclient". If you type "synclient -m 1000", it will update with the pressure, X and Y settings from the touchpad every second (-m 10 would be every 1/100th of a second). I used synclient to come up with the rightedge and topedge numbers in the config above.

Let me know if you have questions. Be careful editing the xorg.conf. It's very touchy, and if you put in a mispelled setting, the windowing system won't come up.

Also, the "man synaptics" will show settings for two finger or three finger taps. I do not believe these settings work with an AAO.

 

This is a great guide and I bet many will be thankful for it, but Linpus has all of that by default already. Perhaps not circular scroll, but everything else

 

Linpus uses gynaptics for its preferences, which I must admit I haven't installed on Ubuntu (I've been running the netbook remix for about three weeks). I know that has circular scroll. If it has the right click region, I missed it. I'm almost positive it doesn't let you custom define regions so that if, like me, your fingers are too big for the default region, you can increase it.

But yes, it's worth noting that 90% of what you can do with the risky and difficult editing of the xorg.conf, you can get from gynaptics, which is easy to install on Ubuntu and is a basic part of the settings menu on Linpus.