sony-vaio-z-series team mailing list archive

[Arnaldo Mandel <am@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi everybody,

The one reason I do not regret having bought my Vaio notebook is the
work steadily being done and distributed in this list and associated
web sites.  Thanks to this, most of the issues have been solved.

There is one, however, which seems to have caught little attention,
although there was a question here recently that got no answers.  

I can't understand why Sony could do so beautiful engineering on this
notebook series, but used a substandard Alps touchpad.  My complaint
is that it lacks multi-touch.

Several months ago, after realizing the problem, I found a workaround
to get a comfortable middle-button; in a former notebook I used double
touch.  Pushing two buttons is usually uncomfortable, and, with a
fingerprint reader in the middle, an ergonomic nightmare.

The workaround was to define a window into the touchpad for the usual
interpretation, and leaving space in the NW corner, so that a touch
there could be bound to the middle-button.  

At he beginning of the year, I did it in xorg.conf . Then there was
the upgrade to Ubuntu 9.04, and the configuration was moved into hal;
somehow I figured it out.  Now, 9.10 came out, and I don't know where
the configuration is anymore, so I am currently pushing two buttons.

I know that the question is more Alps+Ubuntu than Vaio, but it seems
that Ubuntu is popular enough among the participants here.  So here
are a couple of help requests:

a) Has anybody come out with a comfortable way of middle-click on this
   touchpad?  I define "comfortable" in this context as "affording to
   smoothly point and middle-click".

b) Otherwise, any hint on how to configure the touchpad?  The standard
   utilities are useless, I probably have to edit some configuration
   file directly.

Regards,

Arnaldo Mandel