Robert wrote:
I'm having trouble getting the touchpad on my laptop to work under debian woodyMy laptop is a Gateway Solo 1200, and it has a synapticwhen i used dpkg-reconfigure on xserver-xfree86 and set it up as a default ps/2 mouse, the cursor only moved about in about a 640 x 480 section of the screen (im running in 800 x 600 mode), and the actual selection point of the mouse is several inches off from where the cursor is (i.e. when i move as far over to the bottom right as i can i can click on the bottom right part of the screen, even though the cursor is not there) when i set it to GlidePoint, the cursor was still bounded to the small box, but it moved very very slowly about
Not being able to move the pointer outside the 640x480 region sounds more like a problem with your X configuration than with the touchpad. Do you have this problem with an external mouse? Mice only report the change in position, not the absolute position. So I don't /think/ there is any way the touchpad could impose bounds on the range of the pointer.
Is it just a problem with the mouse acceleration? After dragging from the bottom-left corner of the touch pad to the top-right, if you lift your finger and then try dragging again from bottom-left to top-right, repeating that as necessary, can you still not get the pointer to move outside the 640x480 region?
The pointer icon not being the same as the pointer position is a bug somewhere. I'm no expert on X-windows, but my first guess would be that in PS/2-mouse emulation mode of the touchpad has a bug where it is mis-reporting the position associated with a click event. A second guess would be that you are using a video card driver that supports a hardware cursor (e.g. the NVidia binary driver) and there is a bug in that.
Perhaps using a synaptics touchpad driver rather than using the touchpad in mouse-emulation mode will help. There was a pretty good X driver for synaptics touchpads at this site, but as you'll see if you go there, the site is no longer available.
http://www.mobilix.org/touchpad_driver.html A quick web search also turned up this: http://www.compass.com/synaptics/ The tpconfig driver at that site can be installed by doing: apt-get install tpconfig