mactel-support team mailing list archive

[rydberg <rydberg@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Matthew Garrett wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 01, 2008 at 05:47:41PM +0200, Henrik Rydberg wrote:
>> Starting up the CD on a Macbook Air or Macbook Pro Penryn, both of
>> which use the bcm5974 trackpad driver, the mouse pointer is initially
>> frozen. The reason is that the bcm5974 driver only mimics a synaptics
>> touchpad, not a mouse. After configuring the synaptics driver
>> everything is fine, but the default behavior is simply not going to
>> work well for first time users.  This patch upgrades Intrepid to
>> bcm5974-0.6, which by default operates as a regular mouse.
> 
> This sounds wrong. The live CD is supposed to load the synaptics driver 
> by default, so this sounds like a bug in the hal fdi file that tells the 
> system to use this driver with this hardware.
> 

This sounds right! A solution seems to have surfaced in debian
a couple of weeks ago:

http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=464662

The hal policy only needs to be extended with an fdi identifier for
the apple trackpads.

Thanks,
Henrik

-- 
Intrepid: Mouse pointer frozen by default on bcm5974-based macbooks
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/263451
You received this bug notification because you are a member of Mactel
Support, which is the registrant for Mactel Support.

Status in Mactel Support: Fix Committed
Status in “linux-meta” source package in Ubuntu: Fix Committed

Bug description:
Binary package hint: linux-image

Tested on Intrepid Daily Live i386 CD, 31AUG2008:

Starting up the CD on a Macbook Air or Macbook Pro Penryn, both of which use the bcm5974 trackpad driver, the mouse pointer is initially frozen. The reason is that the bcm5974 driver only mimics a synaptics touchpad, not a mouse. After configuring the synaptics driver everything is fine, but the default behavior is simply not going to work well for first time users.

The suggested remedy is to add a second, default, configuration to the bcm5974 driver, where it works as a multi-button mouse, using multi-finger options. This will give several benefits:

* The default Xorg configuration will pick up the mouse input interface, resulting in a functional mouse pointer.

* Multi-scroll will work without the need to configure the synaptics driver.

* Multi-finger button emulation, which currently only exists in the mactel version of the synaptics driver, will work out-of-the-box.

Basically, unless multi-finger-tapping is wanted, no reconfiguration of Xorg or bcm5974 will be necessary. A patch will be submitted shortly.