Description of problem: On Dell Inspiron 7520, the touchpad is extremely annoying to use. A click is not detected unless the finger is released from the touchpad. I'll give examples. Note that this trackpad has physical buttons for left and right click. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): Fedora 18 How reproducible: All the time. Steps to Reproduce: 1. move the mouse position using the touchpad to the top of a window. do not release the finger 2. press the left button of the touchpad 3. move the mouse position using the touchpad Actual results: The mouse cursor moves but the window stays where it is. Expected results: The window should move, following the mouse cursor. Additional info: It also occurs with any dragging, including attempting to move a scrollbar. The solution is to release the finger before pressing the mouse button (so between steps 1 and 2), but it is really infuriating during use. I dual boot with windows8 on this laptop and windows8 behaves as expected, unlike fedora18.
Actually I have looked a bit deeper into this... If I move the mouse to the close button of a window, don't release the button and click to close the window, it does close. The click is accepted, even though I didn't lift the finger from the moving area of the trackpad. So the problem only affects drags. And I looked more about that: if I move the mouse to a position, click, move the position, and release, the window is not moved, but for a fraction of a second when I release the finger, the mouse cursor changes to a hand as if I only started dragging and immediately stopped.
please run evemu-describe and evemu-record against the device when you're clicking + moving and then attach the outputs here. More info: http://people.freedesktop.org/~whot/evemu/
Ok here is about evemu. First I found the device id. in dmesg I noticed this line: input: ETPS/2 Elantech Touchpad as /devices/platform/i8042/serio1/input/input7 and in /proc/bus/input/devices: I: Bus=0011 Vendor=0002 Product=000e Version=0000 N: Name="ETPS/2 Elantech Touchpad" P: Phys=isa0060/serio1/input0 S: Sysfs=/devices/platform/i8042/serio1/input/input7 U: Uniq= H: Handlers=mouse1 event7 B: PROP=1 B: EV=b B: KEY=6420 30000 0 0 0 0 B: ABS=260800011000003 in attachment you'll find the outputs for "evemu-describe /dev/input/event7" and "evemu-record /dev/input/event7 > evemu-record". For evemu-record I first had to run "xinput set-prop "ETPS/2 Elantech Touchpad" "Device Enabled" 0". Now when I ran that the trackpad was not anymore moving my mouse. So what I did was making circles on the trackpad, started pressing the left mouse button while still making circles, then released the button while still making circles, then in the end a bit making circles without the left mouse button pressed. I'll attach the files right now.
Created attachment 705353 [details] evemu-describe output
Created attachment 705354 [details] evemu-record output
$> cat /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/99-synaptics-dontgrab.conf Section "InputClass" Identifier "Don't grab synaptics" MatchDriver "synaptics" Option "GrabEventDevice" "off" EndSection This will make evemu work while X is running. Re-playing your event sequence appears to behave as expected here and the sequence itself looks sane as well. Please try again where the bug is definitely reproduced on your box.
I added that dontgrab file, but shockingly now for me it works, and it kept working even after I removed that file. Admittedly there were a bunch of upgrades recently... So I guess it's not inconceivable that one of them fixed the problem. Although I don't know if it's really the case that an upgrade came between yesterday and today and fixed it... So I don't understand what has been going on: I didn't have this problem for a short time, but I have been using fedora 18 on this laptop since rc4 and the problem has been there from the start. And now it just went away. I tried rebooting under windows8 then back in linux in case it's something windows does, but no change. I tried rebooting on the last fedora 3.7 kernel instead of of the current 3.8 but it also works. so I'm stomped although happy it now works, and very sorry for wasting your time... I'll reopen the bug if the problem reoccurs, I don't know what else to say..
hehe, that happens. there weren't any touchpad-related things recently so it shouldn't have been an update. could've been as simple as hw playing up for a while. oh well, keep an eye out and please re-open if it comes back.