Intrepid: Mouse pointer frozen by default on bcm5974-based macbooks

Bug #263451 reported by Henrik Rydberg
2
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
Mactel Support
Fix Released
High
Henrik Rydberg
linux (Debian)
Fix Released
Unknown
linux (Ubuntu)
Fix Released
Undecided
Unassigned
linux-meta (Ubuntu)
Fix Released
Undecided
Henrik Rydberg

Bug Description

Binary package hint: linux-image

Tested on Intrepid Daily Live i386 CD, 31AUG2008:

Starting up the CD on a Macbook Air or Macbook Pro Penryn, both of which use the bcm5974 trackpad driver, the mouse pointer is initially frozen. The reason is that the bcm5974 driver only mimics a synaptics touchpad, not a mouse. After configuring the synaptics driver everything is fine, but the default behavior is simply not going to work well for first time users.

The suggested remedy is to add a second, default, configuration to the bcm5974 driver, where it works as a multi-button mouse, using multi-finger options. This will give several benefits:

* The default Xorg configuration will pick up the mouse input interface, resulting in a functional mouse pointer.

* Multi-scroll will work without the need to configure the synaptics driver.

* Multi-finger button emulation, which currently only exists in the mactel version of the synaptics driver, will work out-of-the-box.

Basically, unless multi-finger-tapping is wanted, no reconfiguration of Xorg or bcm5974 will be necessary. A patch will be submitted shortly.

Henrik Rydberg (rydberg)
Changed in mactel-support:
assignee: nobody → rydberg
Changed in mactel-support:
importance: Undecided → High
Henrik Rydberg (rydberg)
Changed in linux-meta:
assignee: nobody → rydberg
status: New → Fix Committed
Changed in mactel-support:
status: New → Fix Committed
Henrik Rydberg (rydberg)
Changed in mactel-support:
status: Fix Committed → In Progress
Changed in linux-meta:
status: Fix Committed → In Progress
Revision history for this message
Henrik Rydberg (rydberg) wrote :

Turns out it was a simple interface bug in bcm5974 that kept the touchpad ABS_X/Y messages from passing through mousedev. The mouse compatibility mode patch is being reverted, and the bugfix patch, which will most likely make it upstream, will be sent instead.

Revision history for this message
Henrik Rydberg (rydberg) wrote :
Revision history for this message
Henrik Rydberg (rydberg) wrote :
Changed in mactel-support:
status: In Progress → Fix Committed
Changed in linux-meta:
status: In Progress → Fix Committed
Revision history for this message
Henrik Rydberg (rydberg) wrote : Re: [PATCH] Intrepid: Mouse pointer frozen by default on bcm5974-based macbooks (#263451)

Matthew Garrett wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 01, 2008 at 05:47:41PM +0200, Henrik Rydberg wrote:
>> Starting up the CD on a Macbook Air or Macbook Pro Penryn, both of
>> which use the bcm5974 trackpad driver, the mouse pointer is initially
>> frozen. The reason is that the bcm5974 driver only mimics a synaptics
>> touchpad, not a mouse. After configuring the synaptics driver
>> everything is fine, but the default behavior is simply not going to
>> work well for first time users. This patch upgrades Intrepid to
>> bcm5974-0.6, which by default operates as a regular mouse.
>
> This sounds wrong. The live CD is supposed to load the synaptics driver
> by default, so this sounds like a bug in the hal fdi file that tells the
> system to use this driver with this hardware.
>

This sounds right! A solution seems to have surfaced in debian
a couple of weeks ago:

http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=464662

The hal policy only needs to be extended with an fdi identifier for
the apple trackpads.

Thanks,
Henrik

Revision history for this message
Henrik Rydberg (rydberg) wrote :

The trackpad-also-works-as-a-mouse solution to this bug

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux-meta/+bug/263451

is now upstream in these three commits:

158e0fb6028a2329425d8287b1b2402a12ed4f28
75e21e3f3bb2b4a41bb0646a4d54eef27eb36ca5
a6821f345fd508b17f5ce310b677b37aefb028dc

The make-xorg-load-synaptics-by-default solution is in
progress, with changes appearing in the 0.15.1 version
of the xorg synaptics driver.

Henrik

Changed in linux:
status: Unknown → Fix Released
Revision history for this message
Henrik Rydberg (rydberg) wrote :

Tested on Intrepid Daily 17SEP2008 Live CD:

* Two-finger click works

* Three-finger click works

* Two-finger scrolling works

* Mouse interface works

Case closed.

Changed in linux:
status: New → Fix Released
Changed in linux-meta:
status: Fix Committed → Fix Released
Changed in mactel-support:
status: Fix Committed → Fix Released
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