synaptics gone?

[Andras Simon]

On an up-to-date F-17 synclient complains:

"Couldn't find synaptics properties. No synaptics driver loaded?"

And indeed, there's no sign of the synaptics driver being loaded in Xorg.log.

Is there anything I could check or change?

Andras

[Joe Zeff]

On 04/22/2013 11:08 AM, Andras Simon wrote:
> On an up-to-date F-17 synclient complains:
>
> "Couldn't find synaptics properties. No synaptics driver loaded?"
>
> And indeed, there's no sign of the synaptics driver being loaded in Xorg.log.
>
> Is there anything I could check or change?

(Possibly dumb question)  Does your computer have a touchpad?

[Andras Simon]

2013/4/22, Joe Zeff :
> (Possibly dumb question)  Does your computer have a touchpad?

Yes, and synclient was always needed to make it work properly.
I don't know what changed, or when because I don't reboot it often
(a few times a year). I'd love to know how to force X to load the synaptics
driver.

Andras

[T.C. Hollingsworth]

On Mon, Apr 22, 2013 at 5:04 PM, Andras Simon  wrote:
> Yes, and synclient was always needed to make it work properly.
> I don't know what changed, or when because I don't reboot it often
> (a few times a year). I'd love to know how to force X to load the synaptics
> driver.

In my experience, trying to force X to load the synaptics driver is a
waste of time, since the kernel driver still doesn't load.  :-(  If
you want to try it anyway, create a file
/etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/force-synaptics.conf with the following contents
and restart X:

Section "InputDevice"
    Driver         "synaptics"
    Identifier     "TouchPad"
    Option        "SendCoreEvents"
    Option        "Protocol" "auto-dev"
    Option        "SHMConfig" "on"
 EndSection

To get this fixed properly, you should file a bug against
xorg-x11-drv-synaptics and let them know autodetecting your touchpad
broke at some point:
http://bugz.fedoraproject.org/xorg-x11-drv-synaptics

Include information about your hardware (so they know which one broke
;-).  If you have some old kernels left on your system and can figure
out which one broke it, that would be incredibly helpful to them (and
give you the option to fall back to it until the problem is fixed.)
Otherwise, try and figure out anything that might have changed that
could have possibly broke it (e.g. a yum update to
xorg-x11-drv-synaptics).

-T.C.

[Andras Simon]

2013/4/23, T.C. Hollingsworth :
> On Mon, Apr 22, 2013 at 5:04 PM, Andras Simon  wrote:
> > Yes, and synclient was always needed to make it work properly.
> > I don't know what changed, or when because I don't reboot it often
> > (a few times a year). I'd love to know how to force X to load the
> > synaptics
> > driver.
>
> In my experience, trying to force X to load the synaptics driver is a
> waste of time, since the kernel driver still doesn't load.  :-(

Is there a way to check whether the kernel driver is loaded? Is that a
loadable module?
> If
> you want to try it anyway, create a file
> /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/force-synaptics.conf with the following contents
> and restart X:
>
> Section "InputDevice"
>     Driver         "synaptics"
>     Identifier     "TouchPad"
>     Option        "SendCoreEvents"
>     Option        "Protocol" "auto-dev"
>     Option        "SHMConfig" "on"
>  EndSection

This works. Thanks a lot!
> To get this fixed properly, you should file a bug against
> xorg-x11-drv-synaptics and let them know autodetecting your touchpad
> broke at some point:
> http://bugz.fedoraproject.org/xorg-x11-drv-synaptics

I'm not sure that is the culprit, because it works with an older kernel (3.7.9).
On the other hand, synaptics's maintainers are probably more
interested in this problem than the kernel's.

Thanks again for your help!

Andras