Apple Touchpad Driver (appletouch)
appletouch is a Linux kernel driver for the USB touchpad found on post February 2005 and October 2005
Apple Aluminium Powerbooks.
This driver is derived from Johannes Berg's appletrackpad driver 1, but it has been improved in some areas:
• appletouch is a full kernel driver, no userspace program is necessary
• appletouch can be interfaced with the synaptics X11 driver, in order to have touchpad acceleration,
scrolling, etc.
Credits go to Johannes Berg for reverse-engineering the touchpad protocol, Frank Arnold for further
improvements, and Alex Harper for some additional information about the inner workings of the touchpad
sensors. Michael Hanselmann added support for the October 2005 models.
Usage
In order to use the touchpad in the basic mode, compile the driver and load the module. A new input device
will be detected and you will be able to read the mouse data from /dev/input/mice (using gpm, or X11).
In X11, you can configure the touchpad to use the synaptics X11 driver, which will give additional
functionalities, like acceleration, scrolling, 2 finger tap for middle button mouse emulation, 3 finger tap for
right button mouse emulation, etc. In order to do this, make sure you're using a recent version of the
synaptics driver (tested with 0.14.2, available from 2), and configure a new input device in your X11
configuration file (take a look below for an example). For additional configuration, see the synaptics driver
documentation:
Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Synaptics Touchpad"
Driver "synaptics"
Option "SendCoreEvents" "true"
Option "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
Option "Protocol" "auto-dev"
Option "LeftEdge" "0"
Option "RightEdge" "850"
Option "TopEdge" "0"
Option "BottomEdge" "645"
Option "MinSpeed" "0.4"
Option "MaxSpeed" "1"
Option "AccelFactor" "0.02"
Option "FingerLow" "0"
Option "FingerHigh" "30"
Option "MaxTapMove" "20"
Option "MaxTapTime" "100"
Option "HorizScrollDelta" "0"
Option "VertScrollDelta" "30"
Option "SHMConfig" "on"
EndSection
Section "ServerLayout"
...
InputDevice "Mouse"
InputDevice "Synaptics Touchpad"
...
EndSection
Fuzz problems
The touchpad sensors are very sensitive to heat, and will generate a lot of noise when the temperature
changes. This is especially true when you power-on the laptop for the first time.
The appletouch driver tries to handle this noise and auto adapt itself, but it is not perfect. If finger movements
are not recognized anymore, try reloading the driver.
You can activate debugging using the 'debug' module parameter. A value of 0 deactivates any debugging, 1
activates tracing of invalid samples, 2 activates full tracing (each sample is being traced):
modprobe appletouch debug=1
or:
echo "1" > /sys/module/appletouch/parameters/debug
1 http://johannes.sipsolutions.net/PowerBook/touchpad/
2 http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://web.telia.com/~u89404340/touchpad/index.html
