Anonymous
Wow, this is incredible, the amount of work you put into my issue when you don’t get anything out of it except a “thank you”. Many thanks.
Just a couple of remarks/questions.
You probably edited /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/synaptics.conf (or something similar like 50-synaptics.conf),
Yes, it was /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/synaptics.conf.
and modified the Option “VertScroll” “1” to “0”. To disable it. In some trackpads, it is “DeltaVertScroll”, and instead of decreasing the number, one needs to increase it to make scrolling slower.
I set “VertScroll” to “0” because I had read that is the way to disable it.
Checking just in case: when applying those changes, did you check “Enable mouse configuration on startup” to on? You probably did, but I wanted to be sure.
You did well to ask me, because it was NOT enabled!! I am actually surprised the default setting is to be not enabled. Anyway, I enabled it.
A) “Difficulty: Easy”- Reduce mouse-wheel sensitivity with imwheel (worked on my trackpad, found solution on mx wiki: http://mxlinux.org/wiki/hardware/mouse-tweaks/, I set it to “1” instead of “3” and followed the suggestion in the comment on how to start imwheel only stopping button4 and button5).
'imwheel --kil --buttons "4 5"
To make it permamnent you must add the same command to the startup file for your selected window manager (I am sure you will find an answer in the forum for whatever WM you are using).
This seems to me to apply more to a physical mouse – got the same impression from the link. I have not implemented this.
B) “Difficulty: Medium” Modify how the trackpad “works” with xinput. (Worked on my laptop)
Install xinput. Once installed, open a terminal and execute:
xinput list
See what id the touchpad has. In my case, it is “ETPS/2 Elantech Touchpad, id=13”
Use the list-props option
xinput list-props device-id
where device-id is the one you have observed in xinput list before. This will display a list of all the different behaviors that can be modified for this device. For me it was:
xinput list-props 13
On my machine it is exactly the same: id # 13
If instead of disabling it, I want to increase the “scrolling distance” (reduce scrolling sensitivity) I would change “Synaptics Scrolling Distance· (initially set to 58, 58)
xinput set-prop 13 “Synaptics Scrolling Distance” 200 200
This made my trackpad scrolling veeeery slow (less sensitive)
(more info (but not exactly the same) here: http://help.ubuntu.com/community/SynapticsTouchpad)
That is exactly what I wanted to do, except I set the numbers each to 100 to see the effect, and maybe adjust a bit more afterwards.
In fact, I checked what the various parameters for the touchpad in my Mint OS are on my other computer, and adjusted a few more on the AntiX computer to the same values.
There is only 1 parameter that baffles me: Synaptics Off. On my AntiX computer it is set to 0, on my Mint computer it is set to 2. I have not changed this on my AntiX computer, and the touchpad is active. I have not been able to get good info on this – do you know what it means?
I must say, this xinput route has given me a bit more hope of not having to replace AntiX on my eMMC computer. So I’ll ask my wife to work with the computer a bit more and see if there is any change.