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:
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