Subscribe in a readerLinux on a Dell XPS m140
A few weeks ago I received my new Dell XPS m140 and like every other machine in my house it had to run Linux. I followed the Gentoo installation guide and that got me to the point where the machine was bootable. I deviated a little bit from the partitioning scheme by only removing the NTFS Windows partitions and leaving the two Dell recovery partitions. I created a /boot, swap and one big / partition.
I am able to use just about all of the hardware at this point. The things I can’t use are not because they don’t work, but rather that I have not yet tried them. I will be posting more about specific features under the dellm140 tag.
Issue with my ALPS touchpad using the 2.6 Linux kernel
When I upgraded to the gentoo-sources-2.6.12-r9 kernel I started to have mouse troubles. I was no longer able to double tap to select text or to select and move windows. If that was not anoyinig enough, the mouse would randomly click things as I moved the cursor around.
My laptop’s ALPS Touchpad seemed to be detected ok and the AlpsPS/2 driver was automatically loaded. Some Google searches revealed that this was the problem and that the AlpsPS/2 driver had an issue with hardware tapping. It seems that I could either use the synaptic device driver or I change the boot options in my grub.conf.
I thought that using the driver would be the best option so I followed the instructions I found here. Adding event interface support to my kernel caused my wlan-ng drivers to completely freeze my laptop when the module was loaded. I didn’t have the time to find out what was really going on so I deciced to try changing my grub.conf.
After adding ‘psmouse.proto=imps’ to my boot options in grup.conf the mouse started to work correctly. I’ll probably end up revisiting the synaptic driver eventually, but for now a working mouse of good enough.
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