forcing use of evdev driver for touchpad on DELL E4310 in fedora core 13

[Peter Hutterer]

On Tue, Jan 18, 2011 at 05:38:30PM +1100, prayner at unimelb.edu.au wrote:
> I need absolute rather than relative position from my touchpad.  At
> Peter Hutterrer's suggestion I installed the following in 
> /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/99-evdev-touchpad.conf
> Section "InputClass"
>         Identifier "evdev touchpad"
>         MatchIsTouchpad "on"
>         Driver "evdev"
>         Option "Mode" "absolute"
> EndSection
> 
> which works nicely on my DELL D430.
> On my DELL E4310, however, the touchpad isn't recognized
> (see https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/637911)
> and I have the same problem as described there, i.e no touchpad
> visible in /proc/bus/input/devices.
> The touchpad works in relative mode, having been initialized, I
> suspect, as a generic mouse.
> My question is whether I can force the use of the evdev driver to
> allow the use of absolute axes or whether there is a low-level problem
> that prevents this.

kernel bug. the kernel needs to send the right magic command to the touchpad
so it actually looks like a touchpad. otherwise it looks like a generic PS2
mouse to us and everything else is hidden by the hardware. this is a common
problem for newer touchpads and usually consists of finding the right magic
sequence.

Cheers,
  Peter