Possible solution. Was: What is the status of ksynaptics in KDE4.2 ?

[Linuxguy123]

On Fri, 2009-02-13 at 16:49 +0000, Anne Wilson wrote:
> On Thursday 12 February 2009 05:53:13 Kevin Kofler wrote:
> > KSynaptics is a third-party tool which is completely unrelated to KDE 4.2,
> > also because it uses the KDE 3 libs. So KDE 4.2 does not change anything
> > whatsoever with respect to KSynaptics.
> >
> For those of us who don't have a hardware solution for this, we need to 
> consider the options.  I presume that for the moment this means that we can 
> continue to use ksynaptics on hardware that needs it, but once we are in a 
> totally KDE4 environment it will not work?  Do you know of anything in the 
> pipeline to deal with this annoying hardware lack?

I found something, Anne.  It doesn't work on my laptop, but it might for
others. 

a) Install the Xorg synaptics touchpad driver.  Unfortunately, I don't
think there are any RPMs for Fedora.  It builds with a simple make and
su make install.  You can get the source from here:

http://web.telia.com/~u89404340/touchpad/

b) Set up xorg.conf correctly. 

c) issue a synclient -l to see how everything is set up.

d) do a synclient TouchpadOff=1 to turn off the touchpad.

Step d actually doesn't work on my machine, even though it does change
the parameter setting. 

I'm looking into this further. I'm hoping to make this driver the basis
of a PyQt application to fix this problem once and for all.   

It would be helpful to me if people tested this driver and let me know
if it works and is stable enough to base an application around it. 

Thanks