Synaptics Touch Pad

[Matthew Saltzman]

On Sun, 13 May 2007, John Bowden wrote:

> On Sun, 2007-05-13 at 10:08 +0530, Vivek J. Patankar wrote:
>> John Bowden wrote:
>>> 	I.m trying to install FC6 onto my new HP510 note book and have run into
>>> a few problems. I will post them as seperate posts as I don't think they
>>> are related. I can't get the Synaptics touch pad to work at all. I'm a
>>> KDE user so I'm having to carry around a usb mouse. On my other FC6 box
>>> I have a "hardware" program in the "administration" section of the
>>> kmenu, which seems to be missing. When I shut the note book down I get a
>>> error message / backtrace from the Synaptics program crashing. This is
>>> the message:
>> *snip*
>>> I had a look into my xorg.conf file and there is an input section for
>>> the keyboard but non for a mouse. Here is my xorg.conf file:
>>
>> Try adding an input device section manually. Do backup your existing
>> xorg.conf before you do so. Below is the input device section from my
>> xorg.conf.
>>
>> Section "InputDevice"
>>          Identifier  "Synaptics"
>>          Driver      "synaptics"
>>          Option      "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
>>          Option      "Protocol" "auto-dev"
>>          Option      "Emulate3Buttons" "yes"
>>          Option      "SHMConfig" "true"
>> EndSection
>
> I tried copy and pasting the above input section, but still no joy.
> touch pad is none responsive and I'm still getting an error when I shut
> down the note book. I will write it down next time. The backtrace
> message is still the same.
> When I got to the "control center" - "peripherals" and click on "touch
> pad" I get this error message:
>
> Shared Memory is not accessible.
> Please add the option 'UseShm ''true''' into the touch pad section
> of /etc/X11/xorg.conf
>
> On clicking ok with the usb mouse, all the options in "touch pad" are
> grayed out. It does tell me its using "libsynaptics 0.14.6a and there is
> no driver installed.

After updating xorg.conf, did you restart X (log out and back in)?

The reference to "UseShm" is really about the "SHMConfig" option in the 
InputDevice section above.

FWIW, my input section is ideintical to the above, except my SHMConfig 
option is set to "on".

Also, do you have the synaptics RPM installed?  You might also try 
installing gsynaptics (for GNOME) or ksynaptics (for KDE), which provides 
a GUI touchpad configurator.


-- 
 		Matthew Saltzman

Clemson University Math Sciences
mjs AT clemson DOT edu
http://www.math.clemson.edu/~mjs