Controling the Synaptics Touch Pad on Dell E1505 in Fedora 7

[LarryJ]

This installs a KDE utility which places an icon in the Panel menu (lower right hand corner of the KDE desktop) that can be right clicked on to quickly turn on or turn off the Synaptics Touch Pad on the Dell E1505. I use an external USB mouse so the synaptics touch pad interfered with my typing.

1. I found and installed a package present in the Fedora 7 Repositories
called ksynaptics. I installed with
"sudo yum install ksynaptics". That pulled in dependency
libsynaptics version 0.14.6c.

2. Then in the "KDE Menu", I discovered the menu sequence, Kmenu
(Lower Left Corner Icon), Control Center, Peripherals, Touch Pad

3. But when I clicked selected "Touch Pad", I was greeted with a
pop-up window which said:

Share Memory is not accessible

Please add the option 'SHMConfig "on" into the touch pad section of
/etc/X11/xorg.conf

4. I then added the line suggested by Pille on the Dell-Desktops list such that afterwards my
/etc/X11/xorg.conf Synaptics section appears like this:

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Synaptics"
Driver "synaptics"
Option "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
Option "Protocol" "auto-dev"
Option "Emulate3Buttons" "yes"
Option "SHMCONFIG" "on"
EndSection

5. Next I rebooted in order to restart the X window server.

6. Now clicking the sequence Kmenu (Lower Left Corner Icon), Control
Center, Peripherals, Touch Pad brings up the Touch Pad Control Center
which has a radio button selection Touch Pad On or Off. I selected
off since I do not want to use the touch pad.

7. Additionally, now in the lower right hand Panel Menu (recall I'm
using KDE), I have an icon allowing quick right click access to the Ksynaptics
utility which is the same menu brought up by the sequence Kmenu (the
Lower Left Corner Icon), Control Center, Peripherals, Touch Pad.

There are other settings in the Touch Pad Control Menu window also such as "Smart Mode", sensitivity, and Touch Pad Borders etc.

Larry

[GrapeShot]

Just FYI...

There is a Gnome version available as well called gsynaptics. It can be installed just as easily:

yum install gsynaptics

The SMHConfig option needs to be in the xorg.conf file for either of these two configuration programs to work. You can also just change the settings in you xorg.conf file to limit the sensitivity, etc. of your touchpad.