Mactel Support

Special handling for bottom of integrated touchpads on Macbook(Pro) 5,1_5,2

Bug #357094 reported by P. Dunbar
20
This bug affects 2 people
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
Mactel Support
New
Wishlist
Unassigned

Bug Description

Within Mac OSX i can physically rest my thumb at the lower portion of the trackpad. While the thumb is resting there and not moving I can move my finger around above it to move the cursor and click with my thumb as needed. This makes the touchpad act as the old maclaptop that had the button there. I can tell they actually disable touching down there during this time cause as i move the finger above, if I then move the thumb it takes about 2 seconds to register the thumb moving.

With the latest bcm5974 (1.14) if I rest my thumb on the lower portion of the touchpad any finger movement above does not register. Only one finger or thumb can be one the touchpad at a time to get cursor movement.

Revision history for this message
Ricky Campbell (cyberdork33) wrote :

Just Noting:

I would assume that this works similar to palm detection. touches on the lower portion of the touchpad are ignored if there is movement on the upper portion.

Ricky Campbell (cyberdork33)
Changed in mactel-support:
importance: Undecided → Wishlist
Revision history for this message
Colin D Bennett (colinb) wrote :

I really want to see this work. I'd fix it myself if things were a little better documented. For instance, what goes in the bcm5974 driver versus the xorg synaptics driver?

In the related bug ( https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/mactel-support/+bug/356317 ) where cornelius posted a patch, it was stated that bcm5974 is the wrong place to do it.

Actually, there are several other things I want to see supported in Ubuntu with the trackpad:
- smooth scrolling–use the scroll axis as a true axis, not only as emulated buttons!!
- other gestures such as three and four finger swipes
- pinch/rotate gestures

I wish I knew where to start.

Revision history for this message
Ricky Campbell (cyberdork33) wrote :

the bcm5974 kernel driver is a low-level hardware driver that should only provide for the hardware to send any signals to the OS at the most basic functions. detecting how many fingers touching, detecting position of touching fingers, and whether or not the button is "clicked". Pretty much anything else that uses this raw information to perform more advanced functions should go in an xorg driver (synaptics).

I hope this better explains the difference.

Revision history for this message
Colin D Bennett (colinb) wrote :

@Ricky: That makes sense. The other aspect is that the "synaptics" xorg driver is used for many types of touch pads, right? Of course I am realizing that it no longer supports only Synaptics brand touch pads. I gather it supports ALPS and the Apple MacBook trackpad as well by receiving touchpad-model-independent events from the kernel module.

Revision history for this message
Ricky Campbell (cyberdork33) wrote :

Yes, that is correct as far as I know.

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