Laptops :: Problems installing Touchpad Driver

I've been trying for a while to install the Synaptics driver for my touchpad without success - XFree86.dsl works with the standard mouse driver but the real driver would be better...

If I look at the driver installation instructions it says:

You need X include files... On Debian systems, you need
to install the packages x-dev, libx11-dev and libxext-dev.

If I use "apt-get install x-dev" (for example) I get a message that the package cannot be found - are these packages really required? Are they included in DSL?

The driver installation instructions then say:

Type "make" to build the driver "synaptics_drv.o"

So, after I unpacked the driver file synaptics-0.14.3.tar.bz2 to /home/dsl/synaptics, I typed "make" and nothing happened. Sometime later, maybe after I installed gcc1.dsl, I tried again and got bunch of error messages but no "synaptics_drv.o" driver file.

Am I missing something basic here? It surely can't be this hard to install a driver...

I have installed the Synaptics touchpad driver for my Alps touchpad on several distros including Debian, but not DSLinux. You must follow the instructions EXACTLY. And yes, it is difficult to install this driver.

The tar file should be put in /usr/src and unpacked. A new synaptics directory will be created. cd to that directory and read all of the README and INSTALL files, especially the one for Alps.

And you have to make significant changes to your X configuration file. And you will probably have to make changes to your DSLinux kernel to include the evdev module.

Good luck, jimbo

original here.