06 July 2005, 16:34 UTCUser-space touchpad driver for ALPS in Latitude D800
Over the past few months (too many!) I've playing with a user-space driver for the touchpad on my Dell Lattitude D800 note-book - an ALPS touchpad.
The 2.6 Linux kernel does contain a driver for the ALPS touchpad, but I am unconvinced that the kernel is the right place for such a driver, and it doesn't let me do interesting things and experiment easily.
Anyway, I now have a user-space ALPS driver that does what I want. I supports corner-taps which give me access to all 3 X11 button, and side-stroking to get a scroll wheel. It also allows me to continue dragging something after my finger hits the edge of the pad.
The sourcecode is at http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~neilb/D800/ALPSmouse.c. It should compile quite easily. You just run it (as root) and tell X11:
Option "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
Option "Protocol" "ImPS/2"