Shaky / jittery touchpad mouse cursor

SliTaz Forum » English Support » Hardware

Shaky / jittery touchpad mouse cursor

(7 posts) (2 voices)

Started 12 years ago by kruege311
Latest reply from kruege311
This topic is resolved

Tags:

No tags yet.

kruege311

offline
Member

Hi all. I recently downloaded Slitaz 4.0 and so far I like a lot of what I see in this OS. However, I'm having difficulty in getting my mouse cursor to stop jittering / shaking when keeping my finger perfectly still on the touchpad. I don't have this problem with Salix so I was using that distro as my comparison. Both distros are using the same Xorg version (1.9.5) and both distros have the same parameter settings in "synclient -l". I checked the kernel versions and Slitaz shows 2.6.37 and Salix shows 2.6.37-6. I'm not sure if the -6 really makes much of a difference but I thought I'd mention it. There have been other distros in the past that did the same thing but also others that worked fine such as TinyCore, PuppyLinux, and Salix.

Would anyone have any suggestions on how I can remedy this problem? My laptop is a Dell Inspiron 1520.

I'm not a linux guru by any means and would classify myself as a Windows user that enjoys trying out different distros from time to time to see how linux has been progressing over time. Since I'm a software developer I'm familiar enough with technical jargon so feel free to use your big words if you want. That being said, if I don't understand something your suggesting I've got no problems asking for the dumbed down version.

Thanks in advance.

Posted 12 years ago #
mojo

offline
Key Master

Installing xorg-xf86-input-synaptics on my Dell Inspiron e1505 decreased the sensitivity of the trackpad.

Posted 12 years ago #
kruege311

offline
Member

Thanks for the suggestion mojo, however it looks like Slitaz 4 had that already installed by default for me so it looks like that will unfortunately not help in my case. I'm hoping that this can just come down to some kind of config file I can just edit, but I'm a little skeptical since as I mentioned, the settings for the touchpad that I saw via the "synclient -l" command matched up to what showed when I ran that same command in Salix which does not have this problem. I did notice in my Salix 13.37 distro that in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d the only file that existed was a keyboard.conf file. There were no touchpad specific files in there. However in Slitaz 4 there is both a 35-synaptics.conf file and 40-evdev.conf file that both have settings related to the touchpad. I guess I might try uninstalling the synaptics driver and see what happens. Maybe the touchpad settings from both files are conflicting or something. It's a long shot anyway.

Posted 12 years ago #
kruege311

offline
Member

Hehe, well removing the synatpics package didn't help any so I put that back. I ran the synclient monitor command and this was the output:

time x y
1.498 4522 2190
1.510 4523 2192
1.522 4522 2190
1.534 4523 2192
1.546 4521 2191
1.558 4520 2189
1.582 4520 2193
1.607 4520 2189

There was more but there's not much reason to post more than just this. As you can see, the cursor moves in very small thresholds in both the X and Y directions when keeping my finger perfectly still on the touchpad.

After doing a little googling it looks like Salix uses version 1.4.0 of xf86-input-synaptics while it looks like Slitaz uses 1.3.0. Perhaps that is why my touchpad works fine on Salix but not Slitaz.

Posted 12 years ago #
kruege311

offline
Member

So I decided I would download version 1.4.0 of xf86-input-synaptics to see if I could make a tazpkg out of it to install it on my laptop. However, I'm not having much luck with the current documentation on how to take the source files I downloaded and compile them. It seems the tutorials I find are related to working with source files from a repo. These source files are just files I downloaded and extracted myself. Could someone please give me a clue as to how I can about making an installable tazpkg out of these source files? I find the documentation confusing on this and lacking in a complete start to finish process for something like my scenario. Also they don't seem to be written to the tune of real noobies when it comes to compiling linux source files.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Now that I have wifi working, this jittery mouse thing is the only glitch left that is allowing me from using this distro on a day to day basis.

Thanks in advance.

Posted 12 years ago #
mojo

offline
Key Master

Download: wget http://people.slitaz.org/~mojo/stuff/xorg-xf86-input-synaptics-1.4.0.tazpkg
tazpkg install xorg-xf86-input-synaptics-1.4.0.tazpkg
If you decide to keep it installed:
tazpkg block xorg-xf86-input-synaptics
Read /var/log/messages and /var/log/Xorg.0.log for error messages.

Posted 12 years ago #
kruege311

offline
Member

Mojo, I can't tell you how much I appreciate you actually going to the trouble of compiling that to a tazpkg for me and letting me download it. That totally solved my problem. My mouse cursor no longer has any jitter to it. I did also have to edit my 40-evdev.conf file and comment out the touchpad catch all block. Without doing that there was still some touchpad jitter. I did that based on some random post I found on an ubuntu forum.

So here is a complete play by play of my issue, debugging process, and resolution. (I'm mostly doing this in the hopes that any of the keywords I type here may pop up in search results of other users trying to figure out the same problem.)

1) Ran slitaz 4.0 from the live cd on my Dell Inspiron 1520 laptop.
1) Noticed my mouse cursor would jitter or shake when I had my finger perfectly still on the touchpad.
3) Tried my salix live cd to see how my mouse cursor behaved under that distro. It worked perfectly fine.
4) Tried to find a difference between the two distros so I could pinpoint the cause of the problem.
5) First compared Xorg versions since I didn't really know where to start. They were the same at version 1.9.5.
6) Did some google searching to figure out what might control the touchpad in linux. Seemed like xf86-input-synaptics and evdev were a couple candidates to check.
7) Looked at slitaz's version of xf86-input-synaptics. It was 1.3.0. Checked salix's version of xf86-input-synaptics. It was 1.4.0.
8) Saw a forum posting somewhere mentioning that it is possible that the touchpad settings in the evdev.conf file (in this case /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/40-evdev.conf) can conflict with the synaptics settings.
9) I edited 40-evdev.conf and commented out the entire section block that contained a line called "evdev touchpad catchall"
10) That didn't do anything for me so I asked for help on getting a 1.4.0 version of xorg-xf86-input-synaptics.
11) Mojo worked his mojo and made a tazpkg for me to download.
12 ) I installed the updated driver and restarted X by hitting "ctrl alt backspace". Then, when I was at the command prompt, I typed "slim" to get back to the desktop.
13) Instantly my mouse had no more jitter so I decided to uncomment the touchpad catch all block in the 40-evdev.conf file thinking it was no longer needed.
14) Restarted X again with "ctrl alt backspace" and typed "slim" to get back to the desktop. My mouse went back to being all shaky.
15) Went back to the 40-evdev.conf file and re-commented the touchpad catch all block.
16) Restarted X one more time and went back to the desktop. My cursor was back to being jitter free.

So bottom line, it looks like if you have a jittery / shaky mouse cursor in slitaz 4.0, (or any other linux distro) you may want to try upgrading to xorg-xf86-input-synaptics-1.4.0 or later AND edit your evdev.conf file (in slitaz's case it's named 40-evdev.conf) to comment out the touchpad catch all block.

Now, all I need to do is figure out how to compile linux source code files by myself in slitaz so good people like mojo don't have to do it for me (though it's very much appreciated).

Posted 12 years ago #

RSS feed for this topic

Reply

You must log in to post.