Fedora 8 on Dell Inspiron 600m

After doing upgrade installs from FC2 to FC4 to FC6, I felt it was time to do a clean install of Fedora 8.

Disabling Touchpad

I had been running 2.6 kernels for NFSv4 work for quite a while. At some point I began using "psmouse.proto=imps" in all my kernel config options in /etc/grub.conf to "fix" the touchpad.

With the fresh install, I lost my old grub config file. (I had saved /etc, but since grub.conf is really in /boot/grub/grub.conf, it didn't get saved.) I started searching for the kernel option because I had forgotten it.

After finding the option again, I booted with "psmouse.proto=imps". I was unable to start X because it was configured to look for the Synaptics device now, which was hidden because of the use of this option. A little bit of searching got me to this informative page, which pointed me to the synaptics man page. The man page does a nice job of listing all the options (but IMO, little in the way of explaining their meaning). However, I did find "TouchpadOff=2" which disables the touchpad features (Tapping and Scrolling) but leaves everything else enabled.

So I added that option to my /etc/X11/xorg.conf:

Section "InputDevice"
        Identifier  "Synaptics"
	Driver      "synaptics"
	Option      "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
	Option      "Protocol" "auto-dev"
	Option      "Emulate3Buttons" "yes"
	Option       "TouchpadOff" "2"
	Option      "LeftEdge" "120"
	Option      "RightEdge" "830"
	Option      "TopEdge" "120"
	Option      "BottomEdge" "650"
	Option      "FingerLow" "14"
	Option      "FingerHigh" "15"
	Option      "MaxTapMove" "110"
	Option      "VertScrollDelta" "20"
	Option      "HorizScrollDelta" "20"
	Option      "MinSpeed" "0.3"
	Option      "MaxSpeed" "0.75"
EndSection