The Problem: some touchpads are REALLY slow under Debian, you have to tap like a piano player to get the little arrow from one window to another.

And yes, this is really annoying since everything works fine with an USB mouse.

Even worse, you didn’t notice the problem with an Ubuntu installation. But you don’t want any brown hot nasty things on your precious laptop.

The solution was here. Maybe you’ve got an ALPS touchpad, not a Synaptics one! Eureka!

Wanna know what to do? Read on!

«Wonderful. How do I know wether it’s an ALPS or not?»

Easy. Type this in your shell

cat /proc/bus/input/devices

Here’s the relevant part of my output (on a Fujitsu-Siemens Lifebook S2110):

I: Bus=0011 Vendor=0002 Product=0008 Version=7322
N: Name="AlpsPS/2 ALPS GlidePoint"
P: Phys=isa0060/serio4/input0
S: Sysfs=/class/input/input5
H: Handlers=mouse2 ts2 event4
B: EV=f
B: KEY=420 670000 0 0 0 0
B: REL=3
B: ABS=1000003

«My output is similar, I do have an ALPS. What should I do?»

Assuming that you’ve already installed the Synaptic driver, you only have to open /etc/X11/xorg.conf and set the “Protocol” option to “alps”in the touchpad section.

sudo nano /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Here’s mine:

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Synaptics Touchpad"
Driver "synaptics"
Option "SendCoreEvents" "true"
Option "Device" "/dev/psaux"
Option "Protocol" "alps"
Option "HorizScrollDelta" "0"
Option "SHMConfig" "true"
EndSection

Save with CTRL+O, close nano with CTRL+X and restart the X server by hitting the CTRL+ALT+BACKSPACE keys and enjoy a F1-speeding arrow :o)

UPDATE!!!

Now I’m on Arch and didn’t have problems so far, so I am posting my touchpad section in xorg.conf, maybe it will work on Debian too…

Section "InputDevice"
        Driver        "synaptics"
        Identifier    "Touchpad"
        Option        "Device"        "/dev/input/mouse0" #"/dev/psaux"
        Option        "Protocol"      "auto-dev"                      
        Option        "LeftEdge"      "130"     #"1700"               
        Option        "RightEdge"     "840"     #"5300"               
        Option        "TopEdge"       "130"     #"1700"               
        Option        "BottomEdge"    "640"     #"4200"               
        Option        "FingerLow"     "7"       #"25"                 
        Option        "FingerHigh"    "8"       #"30"                 
        Option        "MaxTapTime"    "180"                           
        Option        "MaxTapMove"    "110"     #"220"                
        Option        "EmulateMidButtonTime"    "75"    #added line   
        Option        "VertScrollDelta" "20"    #"100"                
        Option        "HorizScrollDelta"        "20"    #added line   
        Option        "MinSpeed"      "0.25"    #"0.06"               
        Option        "MaxSpeed"      "0.50"    #"0.12"               
        Option        "AccelFactor" "0.0010"                          
        Option        "EdgeMotionMinSpeed"      "200"   #added line   
        Option        "EdgeMotionMaxSpeed"      "200"   #added line   
        Option        "UpDownScrolling" "1"     #added line           
        Option        "CircularScrolling"       "1"     #added line   
        Option        "CircScrollDelta" "0.1"   #added line           
        Option        "CircScrollTrigger"       "2"     #added line   
        Option        "SHMConfig"       "on"                          
        Option        "Emulate3Buttons" "on"    #added line           
EndSection