Fixing my Alps Touchpad with the Synaptics Driver November 15, 2005
Posted by Carthik in guides, ubuntu.trackback
Ever since I upgraded to Breezy, the touchpad on my laptop has been acting funky. Just moving the pointer over a link would click it, some of the time. Over the last month or so, I have been using my touchpad with extra care, and so now it is not that big a problem, but yesterday a friend of mine was using the laptop and then I saw that I had to fix this.
To find out what touchpad you have, do:
$cat /proc/bus/input/devices
I got:
I: Bus=0011 Vendor=0002 Product=0008 Version=7321
N: Name=”AlpsPS/2 ALPS GlidePoint”
P: Phys=isa0060/serio4/input0
H: Handlers=mouse1 event2 ts1
B: EV=f
B: KEY=420 0 70000 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
B: REL=3
B: ABS=1000003
So I have an Alps Touchpad. I went to check if my X.org x-server recognizes this.
I did a:
$cat /etc/X11/xorg.conf
to see what I have in the X configuration.
I got:
Section “InputDevice”
Identifier “Synaptics Touchpad”
Driver “synaptics”
Option “SendCoreEvents” “true”
Option “Device” “/dev/psaux”
Option “Protocol” “auto-dev”
Option “HorizScrollDelta” “0”
EndSection
So though I have an Alps touchpad, my computer is configured for a Synaptics touchpad! Time to go solution-hunting!
My hunt ended soon enough. I found this forum post describing how to get Alps touchpads working, and set out to edit my /etc/X11/xorg.conf file.
The relevant sections of the xorg.conf file looked as follows after I was done editing:
Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Alps Touchpad"
Driver "synaptics"
Option "SendCoreEvents" "true"
Option "Device" "/dev/input/event2"
Option "Protocol" "event"
Option "HorizScrollDelta" "0"
EndSection
Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Alps Touchpad"
Driver "synaptics"
Option "SendCoreEvents" "true"
Option "Device" "/dev/input/event2"
Option "Protocol" "event"
Option "LeftEdge" "120"
Option "RightEdge" "830"
Option "TopEdge" "120"
Option "BottomEdge" "650"
Option "FingerLow" "14"
Option "FingerHigh" "15"
Option "MaxTapTime" "180"
Option "MaxTapMove" "110"
Option "ClickTime" "0"
Option "EmulateMidButtonTime" "75"
Option "VertScrollDelta" "10"
Option "HorizScrollDelta" "0"
Option "MinSpeed" "0.45"
Option "MaxSpeed" "0.75"
Option "AccelFactor" "0.020"
Option "EdgeMotionMinSpeed" "200"
Option "EdgeMotionMaxSpeed" "200"
Option "UpDownScrolling" "1"
Option "CircularScrolling" "0"
Option "CircScrollDelta" "0.1"
Option "CircScrollTrigger" "2"
Option "SHMConfig" "true"
EndSection
Now I have it all!! Read /usr/share/doc/xorg-driver-synaptics/README.gz to find out what the parameters I have in my xorg.conf file mean, and what you can change, and how.
Also, there is a tool synclient that can enable you to try out changed values without restarting. To use it you must have the SHMConfig option set to true first.
There are GUI tools available to change settings. For details regarding these, and much more, visit The Synaptics Driver’s homepage
Note: If you also use a USB mouse, then the event numbers may change depending on if you use your USB mouse or not. Read this on how to write a udev rule to fix it.
Ubuntu Blog 
How do you fix an “ALPS Touch Pad Driver” if you think you have tried everything?
Please Help
Besides all the points mentioned above, it is additionally beneficial to have an XML sitemap submitted to search engines via their webmaster instruments account. By this I have noticed that webpages start to get listed quicker.
[…] Of course there were some annoyances like the fact that my ALPS touchpad was not working as it should (clicking for me randomly) but I was able to find a description and a guide to fix the issue on Ubuntu Blog, right here on WordPress.com. I definiately have to read past the first page which will be my project for the next few days. […]
I believe you forgot to add the change to the ServerLayout section of xorg.conf
thanks a lot, It worked for me with breezy and my vaio vgn-s2hp
I strongly suggest you listen to abhay. He’s very right – you need to make another change to the xorg.conf file:
Section “ServerLayout”
Identifier “Default Layout”
Screen “Default Screen”
InputDevice “Generic Keyboard”
InputDevice “Configured Mouse”
InputDevice “Alps Touchpad”
EndSection
That last bit originally said “Synaptics Touchpad”.
If you leave this section as it is, then you won’t get a nice graphical display, and you’ll be presented with a lovely blue screen and some weird characters, as X-windows fails to initialise due to an undefined device. That was a panick stricken couple of minutes I had, whilest working out VIM, and trying to work out what went wrong
help…….why does it have one of my alternate email addresses there?????? it should have maxwelszoo@msn.com ……my computer is acting weird! I dont know why the easy launcher keeps popping up! that is part of the touchpad settings! whats going on..please help me
YEZ! Finally! Couldn’t use my touchpad with the synaptics driver about a year. With your config it does work! Thanks!
I own a Vaio PCG-SRX41P. The only thing not working is my jogdial/mousebutton3 and mousebutton4 now.
Anybody got it working?
Works perfectly in Dapper. Thanks for sharing this. You just saved me a bunch of time.
works like a charm on my dell notebook – thanks for sharing this hint!
dmesg | grep Touchpad
[ 39.329929] Synaptics Touchpad, model: 1, fw: 5.10, id: 0x258eb1, caps: 0xa04713/0x0
Tank’s
is my Touchpad and i’m set this for solution.
how to remove press button by touching ?
Why there is no touchpad setting program on linux?
Not happy with the way Bais is saying it, but yeah. I don’t appear to /have/ /usr/share/doc/xorg-driver-synaptics/README.gz. I want to remove ‘tap to click’
bais: try ksynaptics
how can I make the pointer move farther with each stroke. It only travels a little ways on the screen
Wored great on a Dell Latitude D510. Thanks for the clear process.
Hey!
I have a problem too. I have a Synaptics touchpad, and I want to disable the tap-to-click action. I’m running Ubuntu.
Have u got any idea how to solve this?
10x
Option “TapButton1” “0”
Option “TapButton2” “0”
Option “TapButton3” “0”
Should disable tap-to-click. It might be easier then that, but it worked for me. Also,
Option “UpDownScrolling” “0”
Option “UpDownRepeat” “0”
Disabled third button scrolling on my Lifebook – I prefer to use the “wheel button” for its rightful purpose – pasting. 🙂
http://support.dell.com/support/downloads/download.aspx?c=us&l=en&s=gen&releaseid=R86229&formatcnt=1&libid=0&fileid=112896
this is a pretty good way of fixing your ALPS Drivers
ALL YOUR ALPS SETTING NEEDS!!! DUDE DELL HAS WORKING DRIVERS THAT ARE BETTER THAN THE DRIVER SUPPORTED ON MY TOSHIBA DRIVER DISC??? WEIRD. CLICK ON THE LINK TO SOLVE ALL YOUR ALPS DRIVER PROBLEMS
http://support.dell.com/support/downloads/download.aspx?c=us&l=en&s=gen&releaseid=R86229&formatcnt=1&libid=0&fileid=112896
For about a week now my touchpad has been working on and off.
How can I fix it or is it dying. I have a Dell Lattitude D800 laptop.
ho to disable Alps TouchPad Permanently in my NB DV8000US HP laptop,i use a Optical Mouse and due to some physical constraints i have to disable the touch pad permanently……..if any of u ave any suggestions please share ur thoughts with me
Amitava:
Have you tried removing that input section from your X config? It would then not register input events.
PAVILION NBCTO DV4000
is there a way to to disable the ALPS touchpad Left & Right TAB keys ….
i lost my way
I am also having issues with the Alps touchpad on a Toshiba Satellite. It all of the sudden starts auto scrolling all over the place, you click on one spot an dit moves by itself to another. It won’t let me scroll on some pages. Very bizzare. So my question is will the above fixes help my problem also? I am frustrated and fed up…..Yikes!!!!!
Thanks for any help…
Hello, I have a problem as well. I have a Synaptics TouchPad V6.2, and I want to disable the tap to click feature.
Does anybody have any idea how to solve this? I have Windows XP.
Thanks!
Great Work guys, tried this on a Dell CPX/J laptop running Ubuntu 6.10 worked a treat
Many Thanks
Thank you very much guys. It work great on my Toshiba Satellite M50 -MX5 running Ubuntu 6.10. I make changes in both Section “ServerLayout” and “InputDevice”
[…] Touchpad was wrongly recognized — it is not Synaptic but ALPS so edit of /etc/X11/xorg.conf was needed. All informations what to change are described in README.alps (part of xserver-xorg-input-synaptic package). Idea found on Ubuntu blog. […]
After much trial and searching, I finally found a fix to turn off the tap on the ALPS touchpad on my Dell D600 w/WinXP Pro…
First, make sure your system is using drivers and recognizes hardware as ALPS touchpad (not generic PS/2 mouse). If not, install drivers from Dell site for ALPS and change. From Dell site, search for R113813 in Tech support. Download and install executable file for ALPS glidepoint/stickpointer v5.4. Touchpad control is added to task bar…right-click and go to control (properties) and make adjustments as wanted. The control disappeared after the next boot, but the settings I changed remained. Good luck!
let’s hope it works, just changed my xorg file, gona restart now
this almost worked for me. When I followed the instructions exactly, including the server layout change Josh mentions above in the comments, my touchpad got really really slow and scrolling stopped working. To solve this i needed to combine the two sections that reference the input device for ALPS in the xorg.conf file into one. I just deleted the first reference and then added the horizontal line option to the second. After that it worked fine and was fully configuarble. as I side note i also don’t have the readme and had to guess how to turn off tapping. I made the Max Tap TIme and move time to “0.” I am using Fiesty Fawn on a dell latitude 420.
I have a Fujitsu Siemens S6120D laptop whit alps touchpad, but now i want to use the 2 middelbutton to scroll i apps, such firefox, openoffice, etc… how to make them work??
It is totaly four buttons left, middel up, middel down, and right…
or how to make a scrollarea on my touch direcly?
And one more thin otp, how to swich place for “Fn” and the right “Ctrl”??? Using ubuntu…
I meant the left ctrl of course 😉
Tony: Had problems with the alps touchpad on my S6120 too. The “solution” I use is to run the following before X starts:
rmmod psmouse && modprobe psmouse
echo -n reconnect > /sys/bus/serio/devices/serio4/drvctl
echo -n reconnect > /sys/bus/serio/devices/serio4/drvctl
This takes care of touchpad initialization. HTH
Ubuntu fiesty is not able to detect my touchpad at all?
dmesg, Xorg.log, /proc/bus/input/devices doesn’t show any sign of touchpad detection.. 😦
Any ideas to make it detect?
Be careful when implementing this guide. And, if you butch your xorg.conf remember that you edit it from the terminal.
I notticed hat this guide doesn’t take into account that different laptops will have their ALPS glidepoint associated to different event#. Make sure your ALPS pad is associated to the right event number in the xorg config. For instance mine was event 4, and this had to be reflected in my input device section of the xorg.
Vertical scrolling did not work until I fixed this.
I see it’s been about a year since the last post but I’ll try to search for some clarification. Hopefully this thread is not dead yet.
The procedures for manually configuring the xorg.conf file (or X86free) work in general for ALPS touchpads. My concern is that manually editing the file prevents it from updating when using autoupdate (in my case Ubuntu Gutsy). Alternatively, running “dpkg-reconfigure -phigh xserver-xorg” (suggested by the conf file) reverts the manual configuration made for proper ALPS work.
As I am relatively new to Linux, I need the auto update and find it overwhelming to manually reconfigure xorg after every update, could anyone suggest a solution.
Thank you.
I have Windows XP Pro and the Synaptecs driver for the ALPS hardware. To disable the pointer or touchpad independantly, Dell has this driver that gives you the option. Install the driver and then go to the mouse options in the Control Panel. It will have a tab concerning the options.
http://support.dell.com/support/downloads/download.aspx?c=us&l=en&s=gen&releaseid=R113813&SystemID=INS_PNT_P4_XPS&servicetag=BH5JT61&os=WW1&osl=en&deviceid=2514&devlib=0&typecnt=0&vercnt=5&catid=-1&impid=-1&formatcnt=1&libid=17&fileid=149404
Hello I’d done everything you say to configure my touchpad but my system crash 😦 mi flavor of ubuntu it’s gutsy can you help me? my touch pad moves so slow, and when i try to configure it inside ubuntu the configuration only wors for my external mouse
my laptop is an HP dv2700
[…] übersteigt meines Erachtens bei weitem das, was von normalen Usern erwartet werden kann. Auch die Konfiguration der xorg.conf kann man von Menschen, die ein vorinstalliertes System kaufen, nicht […]
Thank you very much guys. It work great on my Toshiba Satellite M50 -MX5 running Ubuntu 6.10. I make changes in both Section “ServerLayout” and “InputDevice”
Thank you for the post, is there anyone who knows the pin out of the ALPS wilus ic chip? Im trying to hack it, I would like to know if it has the same pinning as the synaptics, please advise thanks 🙂
After trying everything findable by Google for this problem, I finaly found a post on FedoraForum.org that solves activating the Synaptics/ALPS trackpad on a Dell XPS M1530 laptop:
http://fedoraforum.org/forum/showpost.php?p=1023462&postcount=17
Solution: add “i8042.nomux=1” to the grub command line for the chosen kernel at boot. Use Google to find out how to modify the /boot/grub/grub.conf (or /boot/grub/menu.lst – same file) and add the above (minus quotes) to the kernel line.
You can now use either the default mouse driver or the Synaptics driver described by the blog post above.
please, my touchpad dont work every well. it keeps on jumping around or it will not work at all. please if you a solution, send it to makins2rue@yahoo.com. thanks
sorry, it HP Pavilion dv2700 with ALps touchpad [2 ways] driver
please CHUCK, call me will this no 08037943442
I have the same problem and my touchpad mouse keeps jumping all the time. I call HP and they told me I suppose to use Windows Vista and no windows XP but I am sure this problem can be fixed. Please!!! Help!!!!HP told me that my tochpad mouse drver is ALPS. Anyway I can solve this problem? any driver I can download from internet and install and fix the problem?
hello i have a acer aspire 5315-2326 and the touch pad is not working properle it jumps all around but that seemed to have stoped but now it gets very hot and i dont know y can someone help me thanks mike
Hello everyone. I have a vaio sz71wn with an Alps Touch Pad on ubuntu 8.04. My touchpad works wrong. More precisely the right button run for more time correcty and at the same time only if I press hard. I don’t know if it is an hardware problem or it depend about synaptic driver.
If sameone help me i will pleased to him.
Hello,
My name is Jonathan and my acer Aspire 5720-4353 and the Alps Touch Pad stopped working shorthly after I ran a deep analysis of the iolo system professional 7. I would deeply appreciated, if some
one could please HELP me to resolve this dilemma.
Thanks in advance, for your cooperation is HIGHLY APPRECIATED.
Jonathan Gustave
I deployed these instructions, but it doesn’t do much for me. I have Alps gui for Mint 7 and it does not control any features. Original mouse icon in control center still controlls the pad.
I have Dell xps 1530 with ALPS touchpad and it has gone whacky, locks, hangs up, moves cursor slowly, tried all the settings, still not working.
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Thanks great tutorial.It helped to start working
Works perfectly in Dapper. Thanks for sharing this. You just saved me a bunch of time.
works like a charm on my dell notebook – thanks for sharing this hint!
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[…] Fixing my Alps Touchpad with the Synaptics Driver « Ubuntu BlogFixing my Alps Touchpad with the Synaptics Driver November 15, 2005 … PAVILION NBCTO DV4000 is there a way to to disable the ALPS touchpad Left & Right TAB keys …. i lost my way… […]
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for ubuntu user solution here http://people.canonical.com/~sforshee/alps-touchpad/psmouse-alps-0.10/
Thank you Ondřej Blažík. That works for my dell inspiron 5110. But I couldn’t find how to disable the touchpad.
finally, scrolling works on my touchpad. thanks a lot.
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