How to Disable Touchpad tap in Toshiba Tecra R850 in Oneiric - it is recognized as a PS/2 mouse

Question

I know there's a lot of similar questions, but nothing I have tried here works yet - perhaps I was doing it wrong.

New Laptop - Toshiba Tecra R850 with an install of Oneiric 64 bit.

Mostly things are working well, but I have a problem with the touchpad (or whatever it's called) - whenever I use it for moving the mouse pointer I accidentally tap on it - basically I am clicking all over the place by accident. So I want to disable the tap-as-click (after all, I have buttons for clicks too).

I open up "Mouse and Touchpad" and on the Touchpad tab I check "Disable touchpad when typing" and UNcheck "Enable mouse clicks with touchpad". This does not achieve anything. Ditto Synaptiks and other similar tools.

EDIT

OK it turns out that this is a somewhat known problem - it seems the touchpad is not being recognized as a touchpad, it is seen as a PS/2 mouse. So any adjustments made with various settings programs to the "touchpad" don't affect it.

I've been looking at solutions for getting the touchpad correctly recognized and not achieved it yet - seems there is a problem at the kernel level...I tried (foolishly) a suggestion to replace the psmouse.ko driver ...this screwed some stuff up and didn't solve my problem.

So - anyone know an answer?

Thanks

Kibi

Solution

Ha! found it eventually on Ubuntu forums. You'd think this would be fixed in the kernel by now...

I found this and worked for me - at this site http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=11478976

I downloaded and installed the driver indicated from here: http://people.canonical.com/~sforshee/alps-touchpad/psmouse-alps-0.10/psmouse-alps-dkms_0.10_all.deb

After installation and restart it works the way it is supposed to.

Comments

[Kibi]

Sorry, that isn't really what I was looking for. I had to first get the touchpad recognized before I could use this setting