Synaptics click and drag problems

[Jon Masters]

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-Macbook5-1.patch
> 
> 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.