syndaemon hard coded to .5 seconds!

The Synaptics touch pad integrated into the ASUS EEE PC 1005-HAB has an interesting interaction with the mouse pad.

I find the text cursor bouncing around when using Ubunutu Netbook (now running Maverick 10.10). I think it is because the

mouse pad is very close to both the space bar and the right ALT key.

There is a way to make this more liveable but it takes a bit of digging.

Under System->Preferences->Mouse on the Touchpad tab,

we find under General the precious Disable touchpad while typing checkbox.

Sadly, we find that the syndaemon process is being run with the odd parameters -i 0.5 .

This disables the touchpad for only 0.5 seconds after typing. Apparently this is way

too short for me :-(

A futile hunt with "grep -ri --mmap" for the setting turns up nothing :-(

Why? Apparently someone decided to HARDCODE the half-second timeout on the touchpad, rather than the default 2 seconds.

Here it is in the source code:

http://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-settings-daemon/tree/plugins/mouse/gsd-mouse-manager.c?id=46cfbb45bac09fd86f13a1995a4b4b2742b39c25#n498

Apparently, I'm not the only one to get "testy" about this. :-)

Ways around this include which boils down to a "syndaemon" command like below.

Further options can be found by reviewing the man page with:

man syndaemon

The following example invokes syndaemon for 4 seconds after any keyboard activity (-i 4), except when modifier keys such as Alt or Shift are used (-K), and only disables tapping and scrolling (-t) for this period.

syndaemon -i 4 -d -t -K

To make syndaemon start up each time you login, add the desired command to the list of Startup Programs in System > Preferences > Sessions or System > Preferences > Startup Applications. See AddingProgramToSessionStartup.

In Ubuntu Karmic (9.10) syndaemon is started automatically by gsynaptics-init but can be turned off in System > Preferences > Mouse > Touchpad > Disable touchpad while typing (which alters the gconf setting: /desktop/gnome/peripherals/touchpad/disable_while_typing )

So let us do this.

First let us put the command and parameters in a file in our home directory and make them executable.

Start up a terminal session. If you don't know how, Press ALT-F2, type in bash and click

the Run in Terminal checkbox. Remember you can always press ALT-TAB to get back to your browser :-)

Once in a nice bash command shell, type

cat >4sec

syndaemon -i 4 -d -t -K

followed by Control-D to close the 4sec file.

Then type

chmod +x 4sec

to make the file executable.

Finally, we go to System->Preferences->Startup Applications and click Add

and fill the fields with the file name, type the path of the file or enter it via Browse if you like :-)

Here is what I have:

For the Future:

I would like to make the Asus EEE PC's hardware "toggle the touchpad on and off" button work too.

The keycode for it seems to be 0x6B as shown here:

and while picked up by the eeepc_wmi , the button is apparently not hooked to anything, yet :-)

Thank,

Chris Lent