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3

Sluggish/unresponsive trackpad on pre-unibody MacBook Pro

rated 0 times [ 3] [ 0] / answers: 1 / hits: 10169 / 3 Years ago, sat, june 19, 2021, 5:00:59

I am running Ubuntu Natty Narwhal on pre-unibody MacBook Pro (2007 I believe).

There seems to be a problem with trackpad - it barely works, in order to move cursor you have to move your finger a lot, and it terminates the 'gestures' abruptly - say you are moving the cursor with your finger and out of the blue it just stops, although the finger is still in contact with the surface of the trackpad.

Those issues seem to dissapear as soon as I boot Mac OS X, so I suspect it is something Ubuntu-specific.

Also, if I try to move the cursor with not just fingertip but increase the contact area, it seems to work just fine, although it is hardly convenient.

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Location: Grenada

Member since Sun, Dec 20, 2020

3 Years ago

answered 3 Years ago arsleyeuth · Accepted Answer

user35553 is right, setting the FingerHigh and FingerLow values via synclient should produce the effect you're after.

synclient is a convenient way to play around with the various options the Synaptics driver offers, but if you’re happy with your changes, you’ll probably want to make them permanent for all users rather than running synclient manually or at login.

Normally you'd do that via the xorg.conf file, but Ubuntu, along with several other distros, has effectively deprecated the use of xorg.conf in favour of device-specific scripts inside /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d. You may or may not have this directory, and if you do, you may or may not already have a file inside it called 50-synaptics.conf. Create the directory if necessary, then open the file (substituting gedit for your editor of choice):

sudo mkdir /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d

sudo gedit /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/50-synaptics.conf

Edit the file to include Option lines that set your desired FingerHigh and FingerLow values. Mine looks like this:

Section "InputClass"

    Identifier "touchpad catchall"

    Driver "synaptics"

    MatchIsTouchpad "on"

    MatchDevicePath "/dev/input/event*"

    Option "FingerLow" "10"

    Option "FingerHigh" "16"

EndSection

Save the file, and when you restart, your new settings will apply everywhere in X.