OT: touchpad with scrolling capabilities

[Santiago Erquicia]

I know that this doesn't belong to this list, but I would like to know
where should I mention this.

I have a new Toshiba notebook and one thing that I really like about my
touchpad is that if I move my finger at the right part of it upwards or
downwards it scrolls the windows up and down.  If I do the same, with my
finger at the bottom part and moving to the left and right, it scrolls
horizontally the window where I am.

Does anyone know who should I comment of this functionality?

[Elton Woo]

On September 27, 2003 09:12 pm, Santiago Erquicia <Santiago Erquicia 
> wrote:
> I have a new Toshiba notebook and one thing that I really like about my
> touchpad is that if I move my finger at the right part of it upwards or

"it" meaning the screen, or the pointer pad?
> downwards it scrolls the windows up and down.  If I do the same, with my
> finger at the bottom part and moving to the left and right, it scrolls
> horizontally the window where I am.

If it's the screen, maybe it's like a "touch-screen" feature?
<*SHRUG*>

Elton ;-)

[Santiago Erquicia]

On Sat, 2003-09-27 at 21:31, Elton Woo wrote:
> On September 27, 2003 09:12 pm, Santiago Erquicia <Santiago Erquicia 
> > wrote:
> > I have a new Toshiba notebook and one thing that I really like about my
> > touchpad is that if I move my finger at the right part of it upwards or
>
> "it" meaning the screen, or the pointer pad?

The pointer pad.  It makes really easy to scroll, like a wheel mouse

[Paul Nasrat]

On Sat, Sep 27, 2003 at 08:12:04PM -0500, Santiago Erquicia wrote:
> I have a new Toshiba notebook and one thing that I really like about my
> touchpad is that if I move my finger at the right part of it upwards or
> downwards it scrolls the windows up and down.
> Does anyone know who should I comment of this functionality?

I'm not 100% sure what you mean by "who I should comment of this
functionality" , as you don't say under what OS you are doing this and
whether or not you see this behaviour under Fedora Core (severn).  I
assume from the fact that you like this behaviour you are seeing it on
an alternative OS and not on Fedora and you'd like to see it there
(based on my knowledge of ps/2 and synaptics drivers).

It however is possible that there could be some hardware or existing
input driver that I don't know about that is providing the appropiate
"scroll wheel" functionality, if that is the case I'd be curious to know
what your Input device settings are in XFree86.  In which case it
is hats off to Jeremey Katz (anaconday), Mike A Harris (XFree86)and
Brent Fox (redhat-config-xfree86) - positive feedback is always good.

If you are not seeing this in Fedora you might be intrested in a driver
that might go into Fedora Extras for Cambridge timescale is the
synaptics touchpad driver that can provide lots of extra functionality
for touchpads:

http://w1.894.telia.com/~u89404340/touchpad/

Currently the main caveat[1] is interoperability on 2.4 with gpm, there
are at least one set of out of tree fixes that fix it, but they are
quite large changes.  I have also seen various patches on gpm list
archives which are all trying to address the problem for 2.6 which may
fix 2.4 behaviour too.  You may want to track the following bugzilla by
adding yourself to the CC list.

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=99351

I will not be releasing the driver to fedora.us until the appropriate
sdk changes go in (or conversely the fedora.us XFree86-source package is
published) and I can resolve gpm interoperablity - preferably by getting
upstream to integrate one of the input driver patches - my preference is
for the work done here:

http://www.geocities.com/dt_or/gpm/gpm.html

Paul
[1] The second is a one character typo in a patch that I've since
resubmitted.  ccacche is now my friend for XFree86 compiles.

[Santiago Erquicia]

Paul Nasrat wrote:
> If you are not seeing this in Fedora you might be intrested in a driver
> that might go into Fedora Extras for Cambridge timescale is the
> synaptics touchpad driver that can provide lots of extra functionality
> for touchpads:
>
> http://w1.894.telia.com/~u89404340/touchpad/

I didn't know about this driver (and I don't know if my touchpad is 
compatible with it, in windowsXP it appears as Alps Pointer Device).

The functionality the driver you said is:

Features

* Movement with adjustable, non-linear acceleration and speed.
    * Button events through short touching of the touchpad.
    * Double-Button events through double short touching of the touchpad.
    * Dragging through short touching and holding down the finger on the
      touchpad.
    * Middle and right button events on the upper and lower corner of
      the touchpad.
    * Vertical scrolling (button four and five events) through moving
      the finger on the right side of the touchpad.
    * The up/down button sends button four/five events.
    * Horizontal scrolling (button six and seven events) through moving
      the finger on the lower side of the touchpad.
    * The multi-buttons send button four/five events, and six/seven
      events for horizontal scrolling.
    * Adjustable finger detection.
    * Multifinger taps: two finger for middle button and three finger
      for right button events. (Needs hardware support. Not all models
      implement this feature.)
    * Run-time configuration using shared memory. This means you can
      change parameter settings without restarting the X server.

Vertical and horizontal scrolling was exactly what I was trying to say.

Thank you