Laptop Touchpad not working [SOLVED]

XxLaSeRxX · n00b Joined: 11 Oct 2005 Posts: 20

I have a compaq evo n800c and for some reason I cant get my touchpad to work in X. I tried emerging synaptics drivers and adding them to the xorg.conf but nothing. A friend of mine has the same laptop and he got it to autodetect it just fine.. not sure y mines not working.. The touchpad works fine in windows and when I installed gentoo with the LIVECD.

Any ideas?

Also I think this may be normal but emerging KDE takes forever. Its been running for over 2 days now and still isnt close to finished. The laptop is a 1.8 GHz processor and I would have thought it would finish in a day.

Jake · Veteran Joined: 31 Jul 2003 Posts: 1132

I have an n800w. I've never tried the synaptics drivers. As far as I know it works as a PS/2 mouse. Configure X to use /dev/input/mice with protocol ExplorerPS/2. EDIT: probably a safe assumption by now, but this is with 2.6 kernels

I'm not sure how long KDE should take. Make sure your "hdparm -t /dev/hda" result is at least in the 20MB/sec range, check "cat /proc/cpuinfo" to be sure you're not frequency scaling (the n800w has been known to sometimes not scale back up to full speed if booted without external power), and don't compile with -O3 because it'll take significantly longer to compile for mixed performance results.

XxLaSeRxX · n00b Joined: 11 Oct 2005 Posts: 20

Im kinda new to linux I just followed the gentoo instructions for kde by useing emerge --usepkg kde. If you can explain -O3 it would be appreciated. And now it DLing all the kde files and compiling them. As far as the touchpad Ill try the ExplorerPS/2 I didnt try that yet.

Thanks,

Jake · Veteran Joined: 31 Jul 2003 Posts: 1132

-O3 vs -O2 is a choice you make in your CFLAGS in make.conf. It's in section 5e of the installation manual.

You can still check your hard drive and CPU speed if you've already started compiling KDE. Either use Ctrl-Alt-F2 to switch to a virtual terminal (Ctrl-Alt-F1 to get back) and run the tests, or temporarily stop the compilation by hitting Ctrl-Z, then using the command "fg %1" to bring it back to the foreground.

XxLaSeRxX · n00b Joined: 11 Oct 2005 Posts: 20

ok thanks a lot.. The ExplorerPS/2 worked likea charm. Also for some reason when I paused my kde install and ran startx (with startkde already in ~/.xinitrc) it failed to load kde.. but if I pressed alt+ctrl+f2 and typed startx it loaded kde just fine(which is what Im typing in right now). **shrug**

Jake · Veteran Joined: 31 Jul 2003 Posts: 1132

It's good to hear you have your touchpad working. If those commands I gave you ("hdparm -t /dev/hda" and "cat /proc/cpuinfo") turned out as expected (note that the hdparm result will be considerably slower if you're compiling at the time), please add [SOLVED] to the subject of your original post.

I don't know about the problem starting KDE from the first console. If it keeps happening and bothers you, start a new thread for it.