On Mon, 2002-07-22 at 01:40, Michael Ableyev wrote: > Now, this little question may sound crazy.. at least for now, BUT.. > Would anyone have any idea if it is at all remotely possible to get certain > control of a laptop touchpad under lunix? By > "certain control" I mean the following: with manufacturers drivers, under > winblows it's possible to scroll the window (for > example) when moving your finger vertically on the right side of the > touchpad. Now, you may say: Well thats with manufacturer's > driver and I how the heck your going to recognize touchpad edges? But! it > seems they already are recognized! When I tap twice > (equal to click + drag) and then move to the edge of the touchpad, the > pointer seems to slowly move in the direction of the > edge of the touchpad. It is possible, though, that this is recognized on the > hardware level and that'll proly make things a > whole lot more difficult. But, then again, I did see this function on several > different laptops (is it a standrad?) > Unfortunately, i'm not a knowledgable programmer and wouldn't know how to > access hardware on low level, neither would I know how > to bind that "side axis" to a scroll bar of a currently active window (and > that is IF it's a standrad!). Nonetheless, this is > one of those little things that will need to be implemented (imho) if linux > is to compete as a notebook os. > So.. anyone have any idea where I should start looking for clues? >
My Sony Vaio laptop does this too. I think it is one of the features specific to the Synaptic touchpad driver in Windows, with no actual hardware hooks. I think the Windows driver itself interprets certain gestures done within certain coordinates of the touchpad and reacts doing certain things. I will check this out myself one of these days. If the Synaptics Windows driver really does use simple touchpad coordinates it may be possible to hack an X mouse driver to emulate Z-axis movement as if it were a wheel.
