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!
