Touchpad tap issue...[solved]

[Neil]

Have had Fedora 15 LXDE installed on my T41 for the last several weeks, and now touchpad tap is not working. All other touchpad functions (that I use) are working. I know I'm getting senile, but I thought tap was working when I first installed Fedora. In the preferences>touchpad settings, I have "disable touchpad tap" unchecked, and if I check the box, I get the same behavior. So far, nothing that I've found allows tapping the touchpad to work as a mouse click.

A while back, I installed Mint Debian XFCE, and at least, out-of-the-box tapping didn't work either. Don't remember what I did if anything trying get it to work, but never did.

So, I booted Debian live yesterday, and found that tap didn't work either...until I found the preferences settings page and ticked a box to "allow touchpad tap", or some such. Then tapping works like I expected. But this was with a gnome desktop. In the past I've found Crunchbang XFCE, Mint (regular edition), Ubuntu, Puppy and a few others to allow tapping without changing any settings.

So, after all this rambling, my question would be...is there a bug or something about XFCE and LXDE and the touchpad functions? Or am I just allowing my Linux ignorance show a little too much?

[GomJabbar]

I don't know if you are using gpointing-device-settings in Fedora or not. It has some additional features aside from the default mouse settings. The only problem I have with gpointing-device-settings is that whatever is selected does not work after a reboot. After boot up you have to deselect the setting, close the box, then reopen and reselect your setting for it to work again. This is a long standing bug with gpointing-device-settings. Don't know why someone hasn't fixed it yet.

Take a look also at thinkwiki for using the touchpad.
http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Synaptics ... iver_for_X

http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/How_to_co ... TrackPoint

[Neil]

Thanks for the reply, DKB. I am using gpointing-device-settings, but nothing I would do in the GUI would enable tapping. The only option available was to "disable tapping", which was pointless, because tapping was already disabled. Anyway, I found that by running

Code: Select all

synclient -l

in a terminal, that tapping was indeed disabled. So, using terminal I changed tapping to enabled

Code: Select all

synclient TapButton1=1

and touchpad tapping is now working, except as noted, the settings won't stick after a re-start. I even put a line in autostart.sh to enable the setting on startup, but still can't seem to get the setting to stick.

[Neil]

OK, I still need some help...
Where do I need to put the command, "synclient TapButton1=1", to make it run whenever Xorg starts?
And not only where, but I'll probably need to be shown how as well.

EDIT: OK, found the info over on the Fedora forum...added the line:

Code: Select all

Option "TapButton1" "1"

to /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/50-synaptics.conf and now touchpad tapping works on startup. I can even use the touchpad to click on my user name in the login box! Whoohoo!