Touchpad extremely sensitive and will not click drag

I have a HP ze4500 laptop. I am using Knoppix 3.8/3.9. the touchpad in winblow$ is sometimes stiff sometimes mucho light touch. I have palm check at near max and it still is so sensitive I often have the cursor in a much different place when I look at the screen. It is slow and often very frustrating. In Knoppix it requires the very lightest touch possible and palm check, well let's just say it almost exists. Does anyone have a suggestion as to how I can improve this in Knoppix? I would appreciate it. Thank you
I Remain - In Health & In Service,
Captain Cautious

I have a ze4500 series notebook too, I used to have problems with the touchpad. I then switched to Kanotix, which is based on Knoppix. The support for the touchpad is not so great in Knoppix but it works just fine in Kanotix. You might give that a shot.

Thanks, I haven't tried that distro yet. Does the new DVD have any better support? I don't read German very well so I'm waiting on the English version.

I unfortunately don't read German at all, so I am awaiting the 4.0 EN release as well. Till then, Kanotix is working quite well for me and I recommend it highly.

Well Try again, I accidently erased the post I had started. While I was thinking about how the touchpad workes I accidentlly dropped a piece of kleenex in it and watched the movement. Hmm I thinks... Then I took a piece of tisse and folded it once and then tried it Very good results! not idel but eminently usable. I too am looking for the En ver. of the DVD. I wonder how much more is on the DVD vs: the Lite. With the transparant decompression/compression will it be 9.4GB or aroiund 18 GB. It will be interesting to see. Have you looked at the beata 2.0 of open office? BTW, Kanotix was prety good but I guess I just like the feel of Knoppix better.
Thanks a lot
Captain Cautious

Every time I've run into a laptop that has a flakey touchpad (super-sensitive, jumpy, or tap-click not working) under Linux 2.6 kernels, this fixes the problem:

Code:

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psmouse.proto=imps

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Pass that parameter at boot (with Knoppix, type it as you would any other cheat code. For more permanent installs add it to your lilo or GRUB configuration file). 2.6 kernels mis-detect the touchpad and that will tell the kernel's mouse driver to use the imps protocol, which restores sanity to the world (well, to the touchpad, anyway).

I too have lost my drag ability when upgrading from knoppix 3.2 to knoppix 3.8. I there a way to get the driver off the 3.2 disk?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by pboodi

I too have lost my drag ability when upgrading from knoppix 3.2 to knoppix 3.8. I there a way to get the driver off the 3.2 disk?

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No, the drivers are from two different branches of code and are not compatible in the way that you want them to be. You will have to seek a solution within knoppix 3.8.

Foam-
While trying to do somethig more convienent I hooked up my ps2 wheelmouse to the ze4500 laptop and Presto :) pointer problems solved. Acceleration was still a shade off but all the really problematic stuffs SOLVED! Hope this helps others out there too.

Yep, external mice are definitely A Good Thing(tm)
Their drivers are much more standardized.

Thank all you good folk with excellent ideas. the "psmouse.proto=imps" from pestie worked excellently. The accelleration was still a shade fast but absolutely nothing like it was. At least I won't have to carry an external mouse to use Knoppix on the road.
Foam.. Have you tried morphix yet, it booted clean and I had NO problems on the ze4500, not even screen res probs. I usually set the knoppix parm 1024x768 . I have most distributions from 3.3 up except 4 & 5, I gave them away then accidently deleted my isos. Is there a download site for the older distros?
By my hand ~ I Remain
Captain Cautious

Quote:

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Originally Posted by pestie

Code:

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psmouse.proto=imps

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Thanks ;) It just works perfect :D

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Capt. Cautious

Foam.. Have you tried morphix yet

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I have, in a sense. I have used PHLAK and Overclockix which are derivatives of Morphix. I have to say that I enjoyed using both, but my current setup is limited to Kanotix, Windows XP, and WHAX (White Hat Slax) and I'm pretty stable with those.

Foam but I'm just now buildin: I finally found PHLAK. Hell of a tool isn't it. I'm not familiar with the second tool you indicted I am building up my tool kit against the time when the "thought police" start deleting such sites. I had a funny, if not so plesant experience with PHLAK. I was copying an article from the disk to a flashdrive to print later and forgot that I was still in root mode, well guess what... Bye Bye MBR on the flashdrive. I overwrote it with the article. The rest of my data is there but I've not had any luck with fixing the mbr and wondered if you have any ideas. "We live, we learn or we die..."

In Service - I Remain
Captain Cautious

Jeez... try this:
copy the partition to a backup file using
dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/home/knoppix/flashbackup.img
wipe the drive using
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda
and then format the drive with mkfs.vfat
then push that image back to the /dev/sda1 partition with
dd if=/home/knoppix/flashbackup.img of=/dev/sda1

see if that works... If not, you haven't really lost anything because the data is essentially toast now - we're just trying to rescue it.

Good Day folks,
Foam, Thank you VERY much for the input. I copied that and placed in in my referrence book as I could not find haw to re-format the Flashdrive. I finally recoverd all but about 20 MB and as it turns out, the only things I had no backups of or otherwise stashed files somewhere else. Oh well I may get to re-do that story later, if I remember it. I ended up using a recovery demo that recovers windows clusters as clusters rather than raw data as a result I only lost the stuff I'd used open office or linux on. After I got that data I tok the raw data stream that I'd made earlier and pieced together about 13 MB more and the rest was such a mess I flushed it. I learned a good leson there but It would be really nice if I could figure out how making th fd writable then copying the file took the MBR, I didn't think that was possible, Live & Learn... Again thanks a lot. :)