[svlug] Touchpad on a Laptop

[Brian Bilbrey]

First the good news - the new tool, a Acer Travelmate 600TER works
like a charm. I have been able to do successful installs of COL2.4,
MDK7.1 and, last night, Debian 2.1 upgraded to Potato. Very nice
little box. 

Box config at the moment... Win98se/COL2.4eDesktop dual boot.
P3-600, 64M, 12G (3.5 Win, balance COL) HD, XGA LCD, ATI Rage
Mobility 8M, CDR/W, 56K WinModem, 10/100 eepro100 NIC, Synaptics PS/2
Touchpad. COL2.4 is running XFree86 3.3.6-3

Now for the bad news - the working requirements for the notebook
mean that it will be a dual boot machine (w/Win98) for the
forseeable future (into the fall, at least). The problem I have run
into is this:

After running Windows, if I warm boot the machine, when X comes up,
the cursor (as presented from the touchpad) is possessed (as in need
of exorcism). Restarting X does not help. Plugging a real mouse into
the PS/2 port, restarting X, removing said mouse and restarting X
again DOES make the cursor work fine. So does a cold boot. I found
one reference online to "yah, this happens sometime..." but nothing
extraordinarily useful.  Clearly a mis-behaving windows isn't
cleaning up after itself (what a surprise), and without a hard reset
of some kind to the pointing hardware, Linux hates the touchpad. 

Anybody heard of a fix for this, aka something to poke the port HW
and reset it, preferably prior to X startup...?

Ah, wait a minute... Although I can't easily try the "run a serial
mouse AND touchpad simultaneously thing using gpm (external serial requires
an adapter) ... nope, couldn't get touchpad data out of gpm and into
X (though it works with a PS/2 mouse plugged in at the back, and in
console mode, the touchpad works just fine through gpm, hmmm). 

There's nothing here I can't *live with*, but I've been struggling
with this for a couple of days, R'ing lots of FM's, and thought I
would ask before I surrender for the time being.

Thanks,

Brian

-- 
bilbrey at orbdesigns.com    www.orbdesigns.com
"You have not experienced Shakespeare until you have read 
 it in the original Klingon."    Gorkon: Stardate 9522.6, STVI