Linux, musical road-dogging, and daily life by Paul W. Frields
 
Fedora 15 adds ThinkPad x220 touchpad toggle.

Fedora 15 adds ThinkPad x220 touchpad toggle.

I was really happy to see that the latest round of Fedora 15 updates brought something for which I’ve been yearning. On my new ThinkPad x220, the Fn+F8 toggle for turning off the touchpad now works. YAY!

My right palm often hits the touchpad when I’m typing, causing the mouse to jump elsewhere and occasionally change the focus. Now that I can hit a simple keystroke to turn off the touchpad, my life will get that much better. I have a feeling this change came in with the update of libXi, but I’m not sure. So thanks to the developers for bringing this fix to Fedora 15, whether that was Peter Hutterer or someone else.

Cheers!

4 Comments

    1. @Adam: Actually GNOME 3 has this feature directly in the “Mouse and Touchpad” settings. I also tend to hit the touchpad with my palm when using the trackpoint, which is probably not covered by that feature. I’m just a constant source of problems.

  1. Bernie

    I have an X1, and I generally don’t like the touchpad, but I really do like the two-finger scrolling.

    Since it’s much harder to two-finger-scroll by accident, I’d like to disable the touchpad except for the scrolling. No idea how, though.

  2. Arthur Machlas

    Awesome. I’ve been meaning to write a script and keybind it to those keys for the longest time, and now I don’t have to. The lesson here is to procrastinate long enough and the problem will go away on its own (or someone else will take care of it).

    @ Bernie, just a shot in the dark, but maybe try creating and xorg.conf section for your touchpad, and increase the xy region for two finger scrolling to take up the whole thing. You may be able to put the tap regions in a tiny corner and have 99% of the thing only looking for two finger scrolling.

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