cursor control in Fedora Core 4 on Inspiron 8500 laptop

[aongusa]

Hi,

I am experiencing cursor control problems in Fedora Core 4
on a Dell Inspiron 8500 laptop. In Thunderbird and OpenOffice
the cursor suddenly jumps to another location in the document.

Is this a known problem?

Any help appreciated.

Regards,

Tony McGuinness

 

[pansophic]

Does the document (the page that you are viewing) move up or down when this happens? If so, it is probably the same issue that I was running into with SuSE where they implemented the scroll functions. The far right and bottom of the touchpad will actually act as the scroll function, even though the pad doesn't have marked scroll regions.

It was annoying the crap out of me, even after I figured out what had happened.


pansophic

 

[aongusa]

Hi pansophic,

Thanks for your response.

The document does not scroll.

Regards,

aongusa

 

[pansophic]

Do you know what type of mouse that RedHat thinks it is dealing with? As I recall, if you set it to a 3-button PS/2 mouse (generic) this behavior should go away.


pansophic

 

[aongusa]

Hi pansophic,

Thanks for your response.

Fedora thinks it is dealing with a PS/2 mouse. However it is actually dealing with a an external USB mouse. It also treats the touchpad as a USB mouse. I tried disabling the touchpad in the BIOS, but that doesn't seem to disable it in Fedora.

I also tried a couple of tricks in xorg.conf. One did nothing and the other disabled X.

Regards,

aongusa

 

[pansophic]

Yeah, for a friend of mine, we ended up just taping a 3" x 5" card, trimmed down to touchpad size over the touchpad. It is one of the best solutions to the touchpad problem that I have seen to date. It looks ugly, but is highly effective.

Is it possible that you are just accidentally touching the touchpad occassionally? That is why we ended up with the card on my friends 8600.


pansophic

 

[aongusa]

Hi pansophic,

Thanks for the tip. If it keeps on happening I'll try the
card. At least now I'm aware of it.

Regards,

Tony