How to turn on SHMConfig, and get touch-pad driver running?

carrt7 · 02-02-2011, 02:41 PM

I've installed Debian Lenny ("stable") on my Dell Inspiron 640m laptop, with Win7 in another partition and data in a third VFAT partition. I want to tame the ####ing Synaptics touchpad.

So I installed xserver-xorg-input-synaptics, which has put syndaemon in /usr/bin. I understand that this app disables the touch-pad while typing, just what I want.

But syndaemon doesn't run at bootup, and when I try to run it manually I get:
<syndaemon> returns error "Can't access shared memory area. SHMConfig disabled?"
<man syndaemon> warns "needs SHMConfig "on" in your XOrg/XFree86 Synaptics Touchpad configuration"

How do I enable SHMConfig? (Sorry if it's obvious) Tony

reed9 · 02-03-2011, 07:52 AM

There's been a lot of changes in Xorg, HAL, etc, and I'm not sure where Debian is at, but see their Wiki on synaptic touchpads.

The salient point is adding a line to /etc/X11/xorg.conf under InputDevice reading

Code:

option    SHMConfig     "on"

You may need to create an xorg.conf file.