Comment 329 for bug 550625

I've been working on changes aimed at providing proper support for these touchpads. I've posted a dkms package with my changes for testing, and I'd appreciate it if you all could test and provide your feedback. The package is available at:

http://people.canonical.com/~sforshee/alps-touchpad/psmouse-alps-0.1/psmouse-alps-dkms_0.1_all.deb

After installing, you will need to either reboot or run 'sudo rmmod psmouse; sudo modprobe psmouse' from a terminal to have the changes take effect. If your hardware is supported by the patch, you should see output similar to the following in dmesg.

[ 1298.568960] input: DualPoint Stick as /devices/platform/i8042/serio1/input/input18
[ 1298.583662] input: AlpsPS/2 ALPS DualPoint TouchPad as /devices/platform/i8042/serio1/input/input19

After testing, please provide feedback regarding the model of your computer and whether or not the driver worked. If it doesn't work, please include the output of dmesg when using the dkms module. You can uninstall the dkms package by running 'sudo dpkg -r psmouse-alps-dkms' in a terminal.

A few notes about the package:

1. The changes include removing the IMPS/2 support from the driver, so if it does not work for your machine your touchpad will revert back to behaving as a plain old PS/2 mouse with the package installed.

2. The driver is known not to support all Alps touchpads. For instance, I have an Acer Aspire One 532h that it doesn't currently support, but I'll be working to add additional support as much as is possible.

3. The driver does support two-finger scrolling, but with the hardware I have at least it doesn't work great. Occasionally the touchpad reports data that looks like a two-finger tap in the middle of a scroll, which generates a right-click behavior. Edge scrolling seems to work better. I'm interested to hear how well two-finger scrolling works on other hardware.

Thanks for testing!