FreeBSD on Dell Inspiron

Charles Swiger cswiger at mac.com
Tue Oct 5 23:40:21 PDT 2004


On Oct 6, 2004, at 12:20 AM, Igor Partola wrote:
[ ... ]
> 1) My touchpad is an ALPS touchpad. When I had Linux running on this 
> machine I had to patch the kernel so it would work with a synaptics 
> ALPS driver (within synaptics there is a file called alps.patch). 
> FreeBSD recognizes the touchpad as an ALPS glidepoint, but the 
> sensetivity is terrible! I use moused and X11 uses /dev/sysmouse, so I 
> tried to tweak with moused options. I managed to speed up the pointer 
> but it gets really hard to point precisely. (In Windows where I can 
> use the native driver from Apoint it is a lot smoother). Any 
> solutions?

There have been some recent discussions about that kind of touchpad.  
You might have to update from 5.2.1 to a more recent 5.3-beta in order 
to obtain improvements, but "man psm" under 5.3 mentions:

      bit 11 FORCETAP
             Some pad devices report as if the fourth button is pressed 
when
             the user `taps' the surface of the device (see CAVEATS).  
This
             flag will make the psm driver assume that the device 
behaves this
             way.  Without the flag, the driver will assume this 
behavior for
             ALPS GlidePoint models only.
[ ... ]

CAVEATS
      Many pad devices behave as if the first (left) button were pressed 
if the
      user `taps' the surface of the pad.  In contrast, some pad 
products, e.g.
      some versions of ALPS GlidePoint and Interlink VersaPad, treat the 
tap-
      ping action as fourth button events.

      It is reported that Interlink VersaPad requires both HOOKRESUME and
      INITAFTERSUSPEND flags in order to recover from suspended state.  
These
      flags are automatically set when VersaPad is detected by the psm 
driver.

Perhaps try setting:

hint.psm.0.flags="0x800"

...in /boot/device.hints...and see whether that helps.

> 2) The ACPI partially works: S1 is supported but it'd be nice to turn 
> off the screen with it. By the way if I disable ACPI (acpiconf -d), 
> closing the lid turns off the screen. Is there a config file or 
> something I could edit?
>
> 3) S3 sleep state reboots the computer. Has anybody gotten it working? 
> Is there an expected fix of it?

Likewise, there has been a fair number of improvements to ACPI power 
management support between 5.2.1 and 5.3; updating to a more recent 
version is likely to help.

-- 
-Chuck



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