Folks,
On the off chance that someone knows the innards of the synaptics driver beyond the basic tunables exposed in synclient...
I bought a new Macbook Pro over the weekend, which is able to run Fedora 12 (albeit not as smoothly as I would have hoped, it took a lot of fiddling and the WiFi is still not reliable). It is dual booting with OSX at the moment. In OSX, the ability to use two fingers to click and drag is very useful. This is not the same as two finger scrolling, this is simply clicking with one finger, and dragging with the other.
Within the Fedora desktop environment, clicking and dragging results in a right mouse button event and no dragging. I turned off the silly (and in my personal opinion anti-useful) right mouse button stuff after some fiddling with synclient in HAL so I don't end up with a lot of minimized windows or "New Folder"s on my desktop every time I try to click and drag. But I still can't actually click and drag. There is a suggestion this is a limitation in the synaptics driver in Xorg. Is that correct?
This seems to have come up on the users list a while back, others have asked, but there doesn't seem to be any solution available.
Jon.
On Tue, Apr 06, 2010 at 11:55:31AM -0400, Jon Masters wrote:
Within the Fedora desktop environment, clicking and dragging results in a right mouse button event and no dragging. I turned off the silly (and in my personal opinion anti-useful) right mouse button stuff after some fiddling with synclient in HAL so I don't end up with a lot of minimized windows or "New Folder"s on my desktop every time I try to click and drag. But I still can't actually click and drag. There is a suggestion this is a limitation in the synaptics driver in Xorg. Is that correct?
Yes. X has no terribly useful multitouch support at present.
On Tue, 2010-04-06 at 17:05 +0100, Matthew Garrett wrote:
On Tue, Apr 06, 2010 at 11:55:31AM -0400, Jon Masters wrote:
Within the Fedora desktop environment, clicking and dragging results in a right mouse button event and no dragging. I turned off the silly (and in my personal opinion anti-useful) right mouse button stuff after some fiddling with synclient in HAL so I don't end up with a lot of minimized windows or "New Folder"s on my desktop every time I try to click and drag. But I still can't actually click and drag. There is a suggestion this is a limitation in the synaptics driver in Xorg. Is that correct?
Yes. X has no terribly useful multitouch support at present.
I thought things were changing in that dept. Is there a place other than the Xorg lists or shall I inquire there for the latest status?
It's looking like the Macbook will just run OSX for the time being, but I'm happy to test out random patches for synaptics, b43, etc.
Jon.
On Tue, 2010-04-06 at 14:04 -0400, Jon Masters wrote:
On Tue, 2010-04-06 at 17:05 +0100, Matthew Garrett wrote:
On Tue, Apr 06, 2010 at 11:55:31AM -0400, Jon Masters wrote:
Within the Fedora desktop environment, clicking and dragging results in a right mouse button event and no dragging. I turned off the silly (and in my personal opinion anti-useful) right mouse button stuff after some fiddling with synclient in HAL so I don't end up with a lot of minimized windows or "New Folder"s on my desktop every time I try to click and drag. But I still can't actually click and drag. There is a suggestion this is a limitation in the synaptics driver in Xorg. Is that correct?
Yes. X has no terribly useful multitouch support at present.
I thought things were changing in that dept. Is there a place other than the Xorg lists or shall I inquire there for the latest status?
Funnily enough, a quick search with the right words brings up:
http://launchpadlibrarian.net/24871592/0001-Make-click-and-drag-work-for-Mac...
That would seem to do exactly what I wanted. I sent the author an email and will see if this still works with the recent driver (it should do). If so, then this would be a good candidate for reworking into upstream.
Jon.
On Tue, 2010-04-06 at 16:22 -0400, Jon Masters wrote:
On Tue, 2010-04-06 at 14:04 -0400, Jon Masters wrote:
On Tue, 2010-04-06 at 17:05 +0100, Matthew Garrett wrote:
On Tue, Apr 06, 2010 at 11:55:31AM -0400, Jon Masters wrote:
Within the Fedora desktop environment, clicking and dragging results in a right mouse button event and no dragging. I turned off the silly (and in my personal opinion anti-useful) right mouse button stuff after some fiddling with synclient in HAL so I don't end up with a lot of minimized windows or "New Folder"s on my desktop every time I try to click and drag. But I still can't actually click and drag. There is a suggestion this is a limitation in the synaptics driver in Xorg. Is that correct?
Yes. X has no terribly useful multitouch support at present.
I thought things were changing in that dept. Is there a place other than the Xorg lists or shall I inquire there for the latest status?
Funnily enough, a quick search with the right words brings up:
http://launchpadlibrarian.net/24871592/0001-Make-click-and-drag-work-for-Mac...
That would seem to do exactly what I wanted. I sent the author an email and will see if this still works with the recent driver (it should do). If so, then this would be a good candidate for reworking into upstream.
The above patch forward ports to recent kernels quite trivially and works *perfectly* with two finger click and drag. It's not quite in an upstreamable state (aside from the coding style), but it is trivial to rebuild the mouse driver with that fix and make a Macbook usable.
The original author tells me he is no longer running Linux on his Mac but that he was told about various more generic solutions. I presume that is a reference to the generic X multitouch work, which is nice, but I think I'll ping some folks upstream to see if some version of this hack can work its way in before too long in the interim. Utopia is nice, but so is being able to use the mouse on my laptop today ;)
Jon.
On Tue, Apr 06, 2010 at 04:22:34PM -0400, Jon Masters wrote:
That would seem to do exactly what I wanted. I sent the author an email and will see if this still works with the recent driver (it should do). If so, then this would be a good candidate for reworking into upstream.
Please don't attempt to put this in the kernel. It's an entirely inappropriate place to do it. If you're interested in making this work, there's a woeful lack of manpower upstream - I'm sure your contributions would be gratefully received.
On Tue, Apr 06, 2010 at 11:55:31AM -0400, Jon Masters wrote:
On the off chance that someone knows the innards of the synaptics driver beyond the basic tunables exposed in synclient...
I bought a new Macbook Pro over the weekend, which is able to run Fedora 12 (albeit not as smoothly as I would have hoped, it took a lot of fiddling and the WiFi is still not reliable). It is dual booting with OSX at the moment. In OSX, the ability to use two fingers to click and drag is very useful. This is not the same as two finger scrolling, this is simply clicking with one finger, and dragging with the other.
Within the Fedora desktop environment, clicking and dragging results in a right mouse button event and no dragging. I turned off the silly (and in my personal opinion anti-useful) right mouse button stuff after some fiddling with synclient in HAL so I don't end up with a lot of minimized windows or "New Folder"s on my desktop every time I try to click and drag. But I still can't actually click and drag. There is a suggestion this is a limitation in the synaptics driver in Xorg. Is that correct?
not quite the same feature but synaptics does provide single-finger tap-and-drag. Tap once, then leave the finger on the touchpad after the second touch to drag. Maybe that is a useful-enough alternative for now.
Cheers, Peter