Bug 831525

Hardware:     Dell mini inspiron 1012
Symptom:      Touch pad grab and drag does not move mouse pointer
Reproduce:    Grab a window title bar and try to move it using touch pad
Installation: Updated Fedora 17 upgraded from Fedora 16 using "preupgrade"

Description:

Dell Inspiron Mini 1012 touchpad freezes when 2 fingers are used, one to move the mouse pointer and the other to press the mouse button buried under the bottom left corner of the touch pad. As soon as a second finger touches the touchpad the mouse pointer freezes on the screen as if Gnome3 has gone into 2 finger scrolling mode. This is the case both when the 2 fingers are in the middle of the touchpad and also when one is in the middle and the other in the bottom corner pressing the integrated mouse button.

"synclient -m 1" shows the primary finger position is still being tracked correctly while the button is being pressed and that the finger count has gone up to 2.

The only activity that this prevents is the "grab and drag" action as moving the primary finger no longer moves the now locked mouse pointer. If I press the integrated mouse button with a plastic stylus the touchpad does not see the 2nd finger I am able to "grab and drag" normally. This function also works correctly using an external mouse.

This behaviour is new in Fedora 17. My fully updated Fedora 16 did not suffer from this problem.

Note that I do not have 2 finger scrolling enabled. I have also tried changing the touchpad AreaBottomEdge setting to disable mouse activity at the bottom edge of the touchpad, and while this does stop mouse pointer movement when the finger is down in the bottom region it does not prevent 2 finger detection and the mouse pointer remains frozen during "grab and drag".

I am aware that the 50-synaptics.conf file has a section specifically dealing with Dell mini touchpad issues, however I think something additional is required to deal with this situation. One possible work around would be to prevent a finger count from the driver exceeding 1 from reaching X / Gnome3. This would break 2 finger scrolling but allow grab and drag.

I assume the problem is with how X / Gnome3 is using the information from the synaptics driver rather than with the driver itself as the synclient test above showed status consistent with my actions. It may be that the synaptics driver has been updated and now handles 2 finger mode with the Dell where it did not before.

Initially I thought this was related to bug 805558 but now believed not to be.