Default touchpad configuration confusing

[Joe Desbonnet]

This may be more an up stream issue for Gnome or x.org, but it does
seriously impact the usability of FC on laptops:

With recent versions of FC (I think since FC4) I've found using the
touchpad on my laptop a frustrating experience: The Firefox browser
would go back a page at random (eg you compose an email in gmail, you
then reach for the send button, but the browser would just go back to
the login page before you can reach the send button).

Last night after some research I finally discovered this seems to be
related to the Synaptics driver in X.org.  There is all sorts of fancy
stuff to emulate button 4,5,6 and 7 etc. It turns out that by default
if you slide your finger from right to left near the bottom of the pad
you get a button 6 event which will cause Firefox to go back a page.

As far as I can tell there is zero documentation on this on the FC
distribution. The Desktop->Preferences menu assumes you are using a
mouse.  There should be a finger pad menu item there also.

I think it would be best to keep the touch pad functionality at a
minimum by default (ie just mouse movement and button 1 by tapping)
and allow the user to enable extra stuff through the configuration
menus.

BTW: this touchpad driver project is at:
http://web.telia.com/~u89404340/touchpad/
and a touch pad configuration utility here:
http://ltpconf.sourceforge.net/sshots.html


Joe.