Laptop with Synaptics mouse driver - How I did it.

[davecs]

I am setting up a laptop with Gentoo. As it is not permanently connected to the internet, and I got it at the same time as getting my Shuttle box, I made a policy of not doing an emerge sync update for 2 months, temporarily running the laptop on Mandrake. This meant that all the stuff I had in /usr/portage could be copied onto a DVD-RW and copied over to the laptop at the "emerge sync" stage of a Gentoo setup, anyway that seems to be working.

The difficulty could have been setting up the Synaptics mousepad. The "official" e-build insists that you unmerge xfree and replace it with x.org, however this is not necessary.

All I did was download the synaptics driver source manually, and installed it exactly as it said in its instrutions. I copied and pasted the relevant bits to XF86Config and restarted X. Unfortunately X did not start, because I did not have "evdev" enabled in the kernel. I recompiled the kernel, making "evdev" a module, and rebooted, forgetting to add evdev to the /etc/modules.autoload.d/kernel-2.6 file.

To my surprise, and against what it said in the synaptics install instruction, the module did load by itself, and it worked perfectly.

This is one of the few cases I have come across where it seems easier to ignore portage and load up the driver the "old-fashioned" way!
_________________
Gentoo, PCLOS-pre-81a and Windows 98SE.
Shuttle SN41G2V2
Athlon XP2500+ o/c to 3200+, 2x256Mb Geil Value RAM, FX5200.
Ntlworld cable internet via ethernet
and PC-Chips Desknote Laptop (with PCLOS-pre-81a )