Touchpad unuseably sensitive following upgrade

[Member Budgie]

I use a revived ancient Dell Inspiron 9300 which has an excellent large screen.
Following an upgrade the touchpad has become so sensitive that it is almost impossible to use. It appears even proximity, not deliberate contact, provokes unwanted actions.

I have read several threads on this subject but they mostly refer to MX and are less than clear on exactly what to install and what commands to invoke. The only file I have found is synaptics.conf and I couldn’t find a man page let alone a simple guide. Other searches have yielded very many more parameters than those in my conf file and I have no idea what to adjust or by how much.

Clear instructions would be much appreciated.
Budgie

[Member Xecure]

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Move to an 4.19 kernel instead of a new 5.XX kernel. The jump to kernel version 5.XXX on my laptop also brought super-sensitivity on my touchpat. I now enjoy this high sensitivity (and feel it is dragging in Windows in comparison).

If you are not using kernel 5.XXX (or simply want to keep it but reduce the sensitivity separately), you can do one of 2 things:

A. Use synclient to change synaptics properties on the fly (and add them to startup to make them take effect when the antiX session starts)
See all variables that can be changed with
synclient -l
For example, you can reduce maximum touchpad speed with
synclient MaxSpeed=1
And also reduce the acceleration factor to 0.01
synclient AccelFactor=0.01
You will need to experiment to figure out what values you are comfortable with.
Once you are happy, you can add them to startup or use this information in B

B) Edit with admistrator permissions the file /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/synaptics.conf
sudo geany /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/synaptics.conf
and edit the variables mentioned in A) there.
Save the file and reboot. Next time you log in you will see that the touchpad sensitivity will automatically follow the changes you made in the synaptics.conf file.

antiX Live system enthusiast.
General Live Boot Parameters for antiX.

[Member Budgie]

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Hi Xecure,
Many thanks. I managed some changes before I received your reply and see they are similar. I don’t much like shooting in the dark however and with your encouragement have now found some more detailed documentation in man synaptics. A good deal of work to read but at least I now have a reasonable description of the parameters and their function. Quite complicated. Part of my problem is that most of the time I use IBM/Lenovo laptops with the red button and disable the touchpad. I keep feeling for the button which doesn’t exist on Dell!
Thanks for your help.
Regards,
Budgie

[Member Budgie]

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Just to close this thread, I never found a setting change which worked well, Getting this right with so many parameters adjustable has taken more time than I have.
The good news for anybody with a similar problem is that when I upgraded kernel from 4.9 to 4.19 all my touchpad problems vanished.

[Member Xecure]

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Great to know. I also saw better touchpad support with kernel 4.19 on my laptop, and used it for a long time. Now on kernel 5.X I did experience super-sensitivity and had to solve some annoying scroll issues (disabled all scrolling except for two finger scrolling, as movement anywhere on the touchpad was stupidly detected as scrolling).

Anyway, this knowledge you acquired might help you in the future, so it isn’t wasted.

antiX Live system enthusiast.
General Live Boot Parameters for antiX.

[Moderator Brian Masinick]

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I think we’ve covered this elsewhere before: for some people who also have a USB or PS2 mouse, you can disable the synaptics touchpad entirely:

more Touchpad.bash
#!/bin/bash
#
# Touchpad.bash
# Syntax: ./Touchpad.bash [0,1]

# Disable the touchpad: $ synclient TouchpadOff=1
# Enable the touchpad: $ synclient TouchpadOff=0
Turn=${1}
synclient TouchpadOff=${Turn}

./Touchpad.bash 1 # Disable Touchpad
./Touchpad.bash 0 # Enable Touchpad

Also, at the risk of repetition, some references:

https://linux.die.net/man/1/synclient
https://linux.die.net/man/4/synaptics

• This reply was modified 8 months, 1 week ago by Brian Masinick.

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Brian Masinick

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