I find that my touchpad's palm detection is pretty awful. I have set it to the minimum sensitivity not ruining my touchpad use (PalmMinWidth=5, PalmMinZ=1), and I still get random bumps whenever I type on my keyboard.
I'd rather use palm detection than disable keyboard while typing because I find that the keyboard is disabled for too long a period (i.e., I'm done typing and I have to wait 2 seconds before using the keyboard again, which is annoying). A possible strategy would be to reduce this delay, although I'm not sure if the touchpad would stay usable (if you know how to do this, post it, better than nothing :).
Whenever I use windows, I find I'm not having so much trouble with the touchpad, so there must be a way to improve palm detection?
Lastly, I'm running Debian testing 64 bits on linux kernel 3.2.0-rc7.
Best Answer
I've had similar problems and found the answer on this blog to be fairly complete and have copied over the relevant details:
Set up palm detection:Turn on palm detection, in a terminal type:
Set the maximum width that should be interpreted as a finger instead of a palm. I choose 4, most how-tos use 10, it's good to do a bit of guess and test here:
Then, set the minimum height of a palm vs a finger:
Finally, under Ubuntu, 3 finger middle click is not enabled by default, so if you want to enable it use:
In theory, this should enable 2 finger tap for middle click, and 3 finger tap for right click, but in Ubuntu 13.04 the resulting behavior is exactly the opposite. Therefore, if you prefer 2 finger tap for middle click use:
To make this permanent once you have found the correct settings, save them into
50-synaptics.conf
which is located at/usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/50-synaptics.conf
in Debian/Ubuntu (Semplice) and at/etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/50-synaptics.conf
in Arch Linux based distros, (the first "InputClass" part is for the multi-touch middle click fix, which is already enabled in Arch so you shouldn't need to add it):Temporarily turning the touch-pad off while typing:
Instead of using synclient commands, use syndaemon:
The arch wiki claims that if you save this command to your
~/.xinitrc
file to have it executed automatically at your next log-in. However, when I did this, I was unaware that the command must happen before the launch of the desktop (exec DESKTOP.session
command). After playing around with a ton of other config files and learning a ton about the SLiM display manager, I finally realized that the command just needed to be moved further up the file, as commands after the desktop launch won't be run until the desktop is quit.