Debian on ASUS: Fixed Annoying Trackpad Palm Taps

Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Mon, 24 Jan 2011 13:55:09 GMT  <== Computers ==> 

I've been running Debian sid (unstable) on an Asus laptop for a number of months now. The Trackpad initially showed up as an "ImPS/2 Logitech Wheel Mouse", and I disabled it with:

xinput set-prop "ImPS/2 Logitech Wheel Mouse" "Device Enabled" 0

I recently did a dist-upgrade, getting the near-to-shipping Squeeze release. It was a big upgrade, taking 3 hours to download and another hour to install. When it was done, X didn't recognize my screen resolution. I had to rebuild the custom initrd file that I use to boot my encrypted disk. After that, my mouse and keyboard didn't work. Turns out that those drivers are now loadable, not built-in to the kernel, so I had to install them. And I had to run "Xorg -configure" to create /etc/X11/xorg.conf. It wouldn't work any more without that. Plus, I had to add the following to xorg.conf, by hand:
Section "ServerFlags"
	Option "AutoAddDevices" "off"
EndSection

Then I was back to where I had been before I discovered the xinput hack above, except that hack no longer worked. The output of "xinput --list" no longer showed "ImPS/2 Logitech Wheel Mouse". The config for my mouse, created by "Xorg -configure", looked like this:
Section "InputDevice"
	Identifier  "Mouse0"
	Driver      "mouse"
	Option	    "Protocol" "auto"
	Option	    "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
	Option	    "ZAxisMapping" "4 5 6 7"
EndSection

I tried configs for recognizing my touchpad with the synaptics driver, but that didn't work. It apparently isn't synaptics compatible.

Finally, I realized that the touchpad was sending its input to /dev/input/mice, and that was getting mixed in with my external "Microsoft Microsoft Optical Mouse with Tilt Wheel" (how it's spelled in /proc/bus/input/devices). So, the solution was to take the mouse input from a device that only provides that mouse, not the touchpad:

Section "InputDevice"
	Identifier  "Mouse0"
	Driver      "mouse"
	Option	    "Protocol" "ExplorerPS/2"
	Option	    "Device" "/dev/input/mouse1"
	Option	    "ZAxisMapping" "4 5 6 7"
EndSection

I found the proper "Protocol" with a Google search. "Auto" mostly worked, but didn't provide the scroll wheel.

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