Beer Goggle Dreams

Warning! This is Linux geekery so avoid if not interested!

So recently my Dell E1505 laptop gave up the ghost. It may just be the video card and thankfully on that laptop it's swappable.

This of course meant I needed a replacement as my personal daily driver. I pressed my writing platform into service immediately. It's a 2007 MacBook 2.16ghz Core 2 Duo with 3GB of ram and a 30GB SSD. It's running Linux Mint 13 Maya LTS. (I so want a large SSD drive but they are EXPEN$IVE!)

This is great because it's fast, lightweight, and will be supported until 2017. Cinnamon is a little slow on this box but not unbearable.

The one thing that I could not STAND and I'm surprised I withstood it the last 5 Chapters I just typed up is that I would get strange random clicks of the mouse.

The symptoms would be that you would be typing along and suddenly it would highlight your text and then next minute you'd type over what you just typed. Other symptoms included activating random functions in whatever program you were running as the mouse cursor would move over some button then click on it.

What I found after a lot of research was that the Synaptic touchpad was never truly disabling that bane of my laptop experience Tap-To-Click. It would say it was disabled but then it would still randomly work. Now it did this to a lesser degree on other notebooks but on the Macbook it was far beyond annoying.

I did FINALLY find a solution that all but eliminates the issue. The following synclient commands are what killed it:

synclient MaxTapTime=0
synclient MaxDoubleTapTime=0

I put this command in /etc/rc.local and I put a script in /etc/pm/sleep.d:

------------------------
nimitz@RGM/etc/pm/sleep.d $ ls

10_grub-common 14_disabletaptoclick
10_unattended-upgrades-hibernate novatel_3g_suspend

nimitz@RGM/etc/pm/sleep.d $ more 14*

#!/bin/bash
case $1 in
hibernate)
;;
suspend)
;;
thaw)
;;
resume)
synclient MaxTapTime=0
synclient MaxDoubleTapTime=0
;;
*)
;;
esac

---------------------

This has managed to 100% eliminate the issue for me. There are other issues with the mouse such as when it wanders into a hot corner while I'm typing but not much I can do yet about that one.

Hope someone finds this information useful! :-)

(Edit: Updated this post to also include synclient MaxDoubleTapTime=0 )


(Keywords: linux mint maya 13 tap click random highlight mouse trackpad synaptics disable)

00:55 AM 09/04/2011

So in the last post or so I mentioned my old PowerBook Pismo that I'd found while cleaning. It turns out I found more than that and combined it all to make my Pismo quite useable again!

I found a CF->IDE drive adapter. It allows me to use a CF card as a hard drive in PATA style notebooks. I also found an SD->CF card adapter. So these plus a known good 2gb SD card gives me a Pismo with a solid state drive running MintPPC linux.

And except for the space issues it's _totally_ usable. A bit laggy in some tiny areas but for the most part it's going to make a wonderful solid-state writing platform. (My blogging software - Xpostulate - doesn't appear to have a PPC version but maybe the developer will be kind enough to let me build one if that's possible.)

(Edit: And I'm an idiot. The source is right on his download page. Plugged it into the Zombie Pismo and once I had the required packages it works just fine.)

As I said the space is not good but later on down the road I can just get a 16gb or 32gb CF card and drop it in there. The adapter has two slots on it so I'm definitely going to see if I can't fit another card in there at some point.

The system needs new thermal paste on the heatsink but that's not a big deal as I've got that around here.

It's just so cool to see something I used so much suddenly have life in it again. :-)