Synaptics Touchpad

Small description of how to change your Synaptics touchpad using HAL instead of xorg.conf.

In this example, I'll disable twofinger scrolling and enable the vertical scrolling on the right side of the touchpad as well as the tap-to-click feature:

1. Copy /usr/share/hal/fdi/policy/10osvendor/11-x11-synaptics.fdi to /etc/hal/fdi/policy
   
2. Now open a terminal and check out the man page for synaptics. "man synaptics". This is beautifully documented description of every option you're looking for as well as many you probably had no idea about.
   Search for the option that you wish to change and read about the appropriate setting to get the behavior you want.
   
3. Open the 11-x11-synaptics.fdi file that you've copied to /etc/hal/fdi/policy. There will be a large commented section full of examples which we will model our options after. All options are passed to the synaptics driver using the:
   <merge key="input.x11_options.OPTIONNAME" type="string">OPTIONVALUE</merge>
   construct.
   
4. So let's add the vertical scrolling option with the line:
   <merge key="input.x11_options.VertEdgeScroll" type="string">true</merge>
   
5. And the tap-to-click feature:
   <merge key="input.x11_options.TabButton1" type="string">1</merge>
   
6. Now we disable the two-finger scrollers:
   <merge key="input.x11_options.VertTwoFingerScroll" type="string">false</merge>
   <merge key="input.x11_options.HorizTwoFingerScroll" type="string">false</merge>
   

Note that even though the man page says that different options take type 'boolean' 'integer' 'float' etc, in the policy file everything is type string'. Simply use the appropriate type as the value. TapButton1 takes an integer where VertEdgeScroll takes a boolean, for example.

1. After this file has been edited. Close X and restart hal with sh /etc/rc.d/rc.hald restart.

Now restart X and enjoy your new touchpad features.