"Clickpad" devices are becoming more and more popular. A "clickpad" is a touchpad with buttons integrated into the touch surface. This includes many variations of Synaptics trackpads and all the multitouch Apple trackpads.
This ppa adds support for these devices, and supports the ability to do zone-based right clicking as well as 2 finger operations, such as a click and drag.The timeframe for testing this PPA is until February 17th.
Installing
Please ensure you are comfortable with recovering your system using only the keyboard if necessary before continuing!
Prerequisites: Make sure you are running the latest version of precise, and all your packages are up to date. Unfortunately this cannot be installed on oneiric or any previous ubuntu release.
1) Add the clickpad ppa (https://launchpad.net/~chasedouglas/+archive/clickpad). You can do this by issuing the following command:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:chasedouglas/clickpad
2) Update apt and run a dist upgrade -- this should prompt you to upgrade xserver-xorg-input-synaptics.
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
3) Logout of your current session, and log in again for the changes to take effect.
4) Does your clickpad device work? If so, you can skip step 4. At the moment, many clickpad devices are not automatically recognized by the kernel. There is upstream kernel work going on that should alleviate this problem in the final precise kernel. In the meantime, you can force your device to operate in clickpad mode for this testing.
a) Obtain your device id by running xinput. You will see a listing similar to this -- pick out the id of your clickpad. In my case, the id is 10, the SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad.
nskaggs@permacultured:~$ xinput
⎡ Virtual core pointer id=2 [master pointer (3)]
⎜ ↳ Virtual core XTEST pointer id=4 [slave pointer (2)]
⎜ ↳ SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad id=10 [slave pointer (2)]
⎣ Virtual core keyboard id=3 [master keyboard (2)]
↳ Virtual core XTEST keyboard id=5 [slave keyboard (3)]
↳ Power Button id=6 [slave keyboard (3)]
↳ Power Button id=7 [slave keyboard (3)]
↳ Sleep Button id=8 [slave keyboard (3)]
↳ AT Translated Set 2 keyboard id=9 [slave keyboard (3)]
b) Execute the following commands to download a script to force your device to be a clickpad:
wget http://people.canonical.com/~cndougla/enable-clickpad.sh
chmod a+x enable-clickpad.sh
c) Execute the script
5) Optionally, you can also turn the lower right corner of the clickpad into a right button zone. This zone will allow you to click using one finger on the right lower corner of the touchpad and have the click register as a right click instead of a left click. "Two finger tapping" for right click hasn't changed by using this driver.
a) Execute the following commands to download a script to create a rightclick zone.
chmod a+x enable-rightbutton.sh
b) Execute the script
Ok, hopefully the upgrade went smooth for you, but if not, You may need to recover your system using ppa-purge and then file a bug on what went wrong.
Testing
Use your trackpad as normal. Are there any issues?
Attempt a click-and-drag with separate fingers. Did it work?
If you enable the right button zone, does a button press in the lower right corner cause a right click?
Does the trackpad behave as you would expect?
Filing Bugs
Please file bugs against xserver-xorg-input-synaptics package in launchpad (https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xserver-xorg-input-synaptics/+filebug).
Make sure when filing to tag it "clickpad", and mention you are testing from the test clickpad ppa. This will make sure your issue is seen by the developers and they will know it is in relation to this new package.
Giving Feedback
Send your comments and questions to the ubuntu-x mailing list with the subject "Re: CFT ClickPad Support". Don't worry if your not subscribed to the list; emails will be accepted from unsubscribed participants. In addition, you can chat on IRC by visiting the #ubuntu-x channel on freenode.
Getting Help
Don't hesitate to reach out to the wonderful folks on freenode @ #ubuntu-x, the ubuntu-x mailing list, the ubuntu+1 forums, or myself if you have questions. Thanks for helping test ubuntu!
Works for me thanks!
ReplyDeleteworks great
ReplyDeleteany idea how to disable touchpad function in areas where i click i.e. left and right click
Works perfectly, thanks so much for this.
ReplyDeleteworks great on my asus zenbook with elantech!
ReplyDeleteThanks, worked with my zenbook with elantech aswell :)
ReplyDeleteHowever, no need to use PPA anymore when on latest Precise beta, I only ran the enable-script.
Could it be possible to get middleclick working aswell with touchareas instead of three-finger-tap?
Zenbook with elantech here too. Both scripts works well but settings are not kept after a reboot. Any solution?
ReplyDeleteThanks loads. Zenbook with Elantech. Works great.
ReplyDeleteOn the final release of Precise you have to manually downgrade to the PPA version of the driver, though. dist-upgrade won't work.
Note, to avoid launching script at each boot, you can launch them into a file /home/yourlogin/.gnomerc
ReplyDeleteThe will be launched during your gnome open session process.
I am trying on an Asus Zenbok UX31 as well. Left button works perfect. How do you do a "paste" ?
ReplyDeleteDepending on your setup, you would 2-finger tap or click the right side of the touchpad to "right-click"
DeleteAfter searching a lot on different forums and blogs I finally landed here. I am trying to help my friend to configure Ubuntu on her laptop using remote connection since I do not have physical access to it.
ReplyDeleteIt's an Asus laptop with an Elantech multi-touch touchpad (which I believe you call it as clickpad. It doesn't have any separate physical left and right click buttons). On installing Ubuntu 12.04 the touchpad could perform left clicks and two finger scroll out of the box. But she wasn't able to perform right click. We didn't try two finger tap since we weren't aware of that option.
So I remotely opened terminal used this command "echo options psmouse proto=exps > /etc/modprobe.d/psmouse.modprobe
reboot"
This now lets her perform right and left click but now the scrolling functionality is gone. Do you think I should remove that file added by the above command and try two finger tap ? I do not want to keep messing with her system since everything I do is through remote connection and she is trying to use Ubuntu for the first time. Many thanks in advance.
P.S : Sorry for the long post.