Ubuntu – Macbook Air Touchpad

macmacbook-airmousemulti-touchtouchpad

I just installed Ubuntu 13.04 on my macbook air. Everything is working great except for one thing. The touchpad behaves slightly different than what it does on the Macbook.

In OSX I can move the mouse event though another finger is touching the surface. IE. if one finger is still and another moves, the mouse moves as normal. This is not the case in ubuntu. The mouse stops moving as soon as the second finger touches the touchpad. This is very annoying because part of my palm or left thumb regularly hits it by accident, stopping the mouse-movement. Not a big issue, but if I could get rid of it, that would be great. Normal 2-finger-scroll works the same way it does on my mac, so it's not because multi-touch isn't working, it seems.

Thanks alot in advance
-Viktor

Best Answer

Installing the x86-input-mtrack driver makes the trackpad on my 2012 MacBook Air (Ubuntu 14.04) just as usable as under OS X. It supports resting the thumb/palm on the trackpad while using it, and 3/4-finger swipe gestures.

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – How to prevent the cursor from moving when I am clicking the trackpad

On my HP Envy 14 Spectre I added this:

$ cat /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/51-envy-quirks.conf 
Section "InputClass"
    Identifier "Envy clickpad"
    MatchDriver "synaptics"
    Option "SHMConfig" "True"
    Option "LeftEdge" "1268"
    Option "RightEdge" "5680"
    Option "TopEdge" "1640"
    Option "BottomEdge" "4729"
    Option "AreaBottomEdge" "3900"
    Option "TapButton1" "1"
    Option "TapButton2" "3"
    Option "TapButton3" "2"
    #Option "SoftButtonAreas" "3915 0 3900 0 3032 3914 3900 0"
EndSection

Edges values depends on your trackpad, SHMConfig option is useful to gather edges values with synclient -m 100.

The option that disables that click area is AreaBottomEdge but it disables right or middle clicking too, only left clicking is enabled.

That is why TapButton2 and TapButton3 is used to mimic missing buttons.

The only drawback of this approach is that you can't drag pressing right or middle buttons, only left button.

Ubuntu – How to tune touchpad for smaller area

It is very simple to accomplish this:

First discover the width and height of your touchpad typing in the terminal:

less /var/log/Xorg.0.log | grep -i range

In my case the output was this:

[    24.188] (--) synaptics: SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad: x-axis range 1472 - 5772
[    24.188] (--) synaptics: SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad: y-axis range 1408 - 5086

So the width is 5772 and the height is 5086. Now you can have a notion of the bottom area to disable, just try out values to get the desired area disabled. The command in the terminal is:

synclient AreaBottomEdge=**VALUE**(in my case 730)

That is all.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – How to prevent the cursor from moving when I am clicking the trackpad

Ubuntu – How to tune touchpad for smaller area

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