Hi,

I just received my Efika Smartbook, and I'm mostly quite impressed with it. However, the touchpad is a pretty wretched input device, and tap-to-click makes the keyboard unusable for me; even writing this message is an exercise in frustration. A little searching seemed to indicate that there was no way to disable tap-to-click. Is there nothing that can be done?

I've taken to running xinput to completely enable/disable the touchpad whenever I want to type something, however this is clearly less than ideal.

Also, with capslock mapped to control, the keyboard does not respond to ctrl+shift+tab, which sucks, but I assume is due to the keyboard design.

Any suggestions?

(BTW, part of the reason I bought the smartbook was that Clozure CL runs on it, and indeed it runs well.)

Hi, there are many who prefer using a USB wireless mouse.

The next version of the smartbook will not have such a touchpad.

R&B :)

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http://bbrv.blogspot.com

When (please!) ?

This makes sense, but unfortunately reduces the portability of the device. After all, I could just carry my favorite keyboard, too.

It seems presently the device shows up as "USB Keyboard", Is there a way I could get access to specs for the device? I would be happy to write a driver that supports turning off tap to click... or at least disables the touchpad while typing.

Actually, maybe I can just hack something like unclutter to keep the pointer banished as long as a key was recently pressed.

Cheers.

Hi tokenrove, feel free to hack anything you think will help. This and the smarttop were our first _almost ready_ to be consumer products. It has been a challenge enough just to move ARM into a reasonably standard desktop environment.

We are not Dell or HP so we appreciate all the community support we can get.

Thank you.

Sincerely,
R&B :)

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http://bbrv.blogspot.com

Well, it's a great little machine, and it'll be even better when it ships with Debian/armhf instead of Ubuntu. Since I intend to use it as my main "on the move" development machine, I am definitely going to scratch the itches that come up, but the more you can supply information about the hardware, the easier that will be.

Is the touchpad supplied by Holtek? Is there a datasheet or similar I could get?

Oh, I wanted to document this somewhere, I don't know if it's a hardware issue but I suspect it's just Gnome stupidity, but gnome powermanager frequently causes the display to flicker unusably (turning on and off rapidly) if "dim screen" is enabled -- I'm not sure if it's that brightness 64 is too high for the screen or what, but I just got rid of gnome and write lower values to /sys/devices/platform/pwm-backlight/backlight/pwm-backlight/brightness. What is the actual max brightness of the display? Also, the display emits an ear-piercing high-frequency whine at some brightnesses (my wife can't even be in the same room as the machine when it does this). Does this happen on all models? (i.e., should I skip those brightness levels if writing tools to be distributed to others?)

Cheers.

Holtek refers to the manufacturer of the USB keyboard matrix peripheral driver (and PS/2 to USB converter) connected to the Synaptics Touchpad. Unfortunately we did not write the firmware for this, and there will be no updates (it is OTP - one time programmable, so what is on there is what is on there). It doesn't properly forward Synaptics protocol and therefore some of the better features don't get enabled or even exposed.

Unfortunately you can't disable it without removing keyboard support from the system..

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Matt Sealey

Ah, that sucks. Thanks for the info, all the same. A userspace solution it is, then... although when I get the chance I'll at least look to see if the events it's sending (through usbhid, I guess?) have any telltale differences between tap and click that could be filtered on.

How about the display flicker issue? Is that normal? I noticed it starts flickering (with a much greater period than previously described, probably once every three seconds) if I sit at the first VC (ctrl-alt-f1).


Addendum: one unfortunate consequence of disabling the touchpad is that the multimedia keys go with it, strangely enough (but not the F-keys), which busts my plan of just toggling the touchpad with XF86WWW.