This works for me... Touch anywhere on the screen with two fingers and make a click. In other words place two fingers on the clickpad then press down. I hope this is relevent, since there are so many types of trackpad. If you don't have a click pad I don't know how to do it... I read somewhere that 12.10 was going to fix it, but I am a linux noob, came from Mac and the same "right click" just works, but when I bought this computer (Acer Aspire one 756) It had a "right click" area that doesn't work in Ubuntu.
So, I'm not sure what the original problem was, and I'm not entirely sure how my pad is mapped.
That said, I found an interesting work-around here:
It mentioned changing some options within /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/10-synaptics.conf
, but that directory doesn't seem to exist for me. It suggested changing certain values for the percentage of the click-pad to be dedicated to a given button, and then it suggested checking certain parameters within synclient -l
. I wound up just manually editing the parameters to match. The boundaries do not seem to match perfectly with the lines marked on my click-pad, but those are completely arbitrary. The differences could be resolved by trial and error if it became an issue, I suppose.
Shift+F10 still does not work, but I have since learned that right-click was simply mapped elsewhere. I don't know where to find the default settings for that particular shortcut; it is not included in the list shown by holding down Super. However, I have learned that it was mapped by default to a button between my right alt and ctrl keys. The key resembles the usual menu, with one bar highlighted. This probably won't be relevant to many folks on non-HP machines.
Thanks, everyone, for taking the time to work with me.
Best Answer
This can be solved using synclient:
Type
synclient -l
to list your configuration. At the end of the output, you will find something likeThese values have to be changed to 0 (zero) by typing these two commands:
and
Clicking anywhere on your trackpad will now always trigger a left-click. To right-click, do a two-finger click on your trackpad.
To make these changes permanent, write the two commands to a shell script and add the script to your startup applications:
Paste this code to the shell script:
Open the Startup Applications program in Unity and add ~/.synaptics-custom-settings.sh to the list of startup applications.