Saturday, August 4, 2012

Trackpad issues in Ubuntu


If you have problems with your trackpad - issues like right-click, drag etc. Out of the box it does not work because Ubuntu sometimes does not recognize that laptop does not have buttons over the trackpad to differentiate left and right-click's.

Here's a way to get around
Open terminal and do the following

If you are using a "samsung" laptop, do the following else skip this step
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:voria/ppa
sudo apt-get install update && sudo apt-get install upgrade
sudo apt-get install samsung-tools
sudo apt-get install samsung-laptop
sudo reboot

In the command prompt type xinput
You should see something like this along with other output

 ETPS/2 Elantech Touchpad                 id=12 [slave  pointer  (2)]

cd ~
wget "http://people.canonical.com/~cndougla/enable-clickpad.sh"
chmod +x enable-clickpad.sh
wget "http://people.canonical.com/~cndougla/enable-rightbutton.sh"
chmod +x enable-rightbutton.sh

Now that you have the scripts that will do the job for you and you have execute permissions set for them, do the following. Parameter 12 is passed to the script. We got the value from xinput  command's output (id=12). If you see some other value than 12 show up in your output, please use that
~/enable-clickpad.sh 12
~/enable-rightbutton.sh 12

Now you should be able to right-click, drag and drop easily without any external mouse.

Well issue now is when you restart your OS, all these changes are gone. You need this functionality all the time. Here's what you may have to do. Move those scripts to /usr/local/sbin directory

/usr/local/sbin/enable-clickpad.sh 12

sudo mv ~/enable-clickpad.sh /usr/local/sbin/
sudo mv ~/enable-rightbutton.sh /usr/local/sbin/

Open .gnomerc through gedit/vim/vi or editor of  you choice and type in the following
gedit ~/.gnomerc
/usr/local/sbin/enable-rightbutton.sh 12


If you don't like a naive .gnomerc file like the one above, feel free to add some error handlers to do things the way you want


That's pretty much it. Now reboot and enjoy

No comments:

Post a Comment