laptop cursor won't move

Forum: Laptops
Topic: laptop cursor won't move
started by: brymway

Posted by brymway on Mar. 24 2008,00:29

I have a Compaq Presario 1800 Laptop, 700mhz, 192m RAM, using the touch pad with two buttons running dsl 4.2.5. When I run the cd, the distro loads up beautifully, opens up perfect, but when I go and try to navigate the mouse arrow it jumps around for a split second and then drops down below the task bar and doesn't move up. I can move it to the left and right no problem but can't move it up or down.
I've used this cd just fine on another desktop computer. I've tried puppy, vector, backtrack, and knoppix and they all work fine. The mousepad works perfect. Is there a simple fix for this?

Posted by Juanito on Mar. 24 2008,03:30

I believe most touchpads will emulate a ps/2 mouse. Did you try using xsetup to chose a ps/2 mouse and see what happens?

Depending which touchpad you have, there is also the option of using xfree86 or xorg72 and the synaptics driver - this will only work for alps and synaptics touchpads though.

Posted by jpeters on Mar. 24 2008,05:51

You can also try different settings for xset, like "xset m default", or "xset m 2/1" (acceleration ratio), or "xset m 2" (general speed).

Posted by ke4nt1 on Mar. 24 2008,17:36

I have had the same issue, but ONLY on a compaq presario lappy.

My fix was to load XF86 on the old beast at startup.

I never could get XVesa to control the built-in synaptics
mousepad properly, nor would an external ps2 mouse work either.

Now it works fine, and is a usable machine again.

73
ke4nt

Posted by WDef on Mar. 27 2008,18:42

There's an ALPS-synaptics driver in the modules section of the repo, assuming it is one of those touchpads.

Kent doesn't say if he needed that or not, but I got the fouchpad working on a Sony laptop using that with the XFree86 extension.

You have full configurability of all touchpad parameters in XF86 conf (google for setting explanations).

Posted by brymway on Mar. 29 2008,03:27

How do you load up xfree86 at start-up?

Posted by Juanito on Mar. 29 2008,07:38

The trivial answer is that you put it in ../mydsl and it will be loaded at boot.

...however, you will need to create a suitable XF86Config file and alter .xserverrc as detailed in the info file. There are plenty of examples of touchpad sections for XF86Config available via google.