Handing Control of Sentelic Touchpads to Synaptics

[David Regev]

Hello Eric,

I’ve seen in several places that the reason Sentelic’s driver doesn’t have
edge scrolling is due to patent concerns. Perhaps absolute mode was
overzealously removed for the same reason.

Yes, I would love some help! If we can get this to work, do you think it
will be possible to merge this upstream? I feel bad for all the people out
there with this touchpad. Some have even gone as far as to remove it
physically and replace it with an $8 one[*]. It would also be great to be
able to say that this touchpad works better on Linux than on Windows.

Greatly appreciated,
David.

[*]
http://www.electricvagabond.com/2008/12/msi-wind-touchpad-mods-sentelic-becomes.html


On Mon, Jul 19, 2010 at 10:43 AM, Éric Piel <E.A.B.Piel at tudelft.nl> wrote:

> Looking at the kernel driver code, the problem is that it only reports
> position in relative mode. The X touchpad driver (aka synaptics) requires
> absolute position reports to work.
>
> That said, it seems that the original driver [1] had both relative and
> absolute mode (cf fsp_onpad_icon()). It would be interesting to find out why
> in the kernel merge, it was the relative mode which was kept, although
> absolute mode looks much more obvious for a touchpad.
>
> If this is just a wrong decision (ie: absolute mode works fine with the
> hardware), you just need to patch the kernel driver, and it should work
> automagically with the X.org driver :-) I don't have the hardware, but I can
> help you with kernel driver hacking if you need guidance :-)
>
> See you,
> Eric
>
> [1]
>
> http://fsp-lnxdrv.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/fsp-lnxdrv/trunk/src/kernel-driver/sentelic.c?revision=37&view=markup
>
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