14th May 2008

Ubuntu, Dell and the touchpad..

After installing Hardy (Ubuntu 8.04) I was rather happy that it worked at first. However, using the laptop without a mouse was a bit tedious. The problem was that the touchpad would not move the cursor very far, which meant to move it required several strokes.

I finally figured it out and it was quite simple once I found this post that is an old description, but it worked for me. Essentially the problems were:

I wanted to use the TouchPad config within Ubuntu to configure the touchpad
SHM has to be enabled in the xorg.conf for the TouchPad config to work.

I changed my /etc/X11/xorg.conf as follows:


*snip*

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Synaptics Touchpad"
Driver "synaptics"
Option "SendCoreEvents" "true"
Option "Device" "/dev/psaux"
Option "Protocol" "auto-dev"
Option "HorizEdgeScroll" "0"
Option "SHMConfig" "on"
Option "MinSpeed" "1.0"
Option "MaxSpeed" "1.0"
Option "AccelFactor" "0.3"
EndSection

*snip*

After a quick restart, everything was great. The cursor now moved with a dash of speed!

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7th May 2008

Upgrading Ubuntu

For a long time now I have been playing and working on FreeBSD and Linux. I finally took the plunge and converted my last machine to Ubuntu. It is a laptop, Dell D620.

Everything went well at first but there were some configuration issues that needed to be overcome. This prompted me to make a separate section on those tips/configs as I would like to keep them together. So far the experience has been really nice and the system has now settled down.

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