Miscellaneous notes for HP Pavilion laptops
The touchpad does a 'button1' mouse click when you tap it, which is much too easy to do accidentally while typing.
The touchpad isn't supported by the 'synaptics' touchpad driver in xorg, at least with the default kernel (as of 2.6.12).
Looking in /proc/bus/input/devices shows
I: Bus=0011 Vendor=0002 Product=0008 Version=7321 N: Name="AlpsPS/2 ALPS GlidePoint" P: Phys=isa0060/serio4/input0 ...
And the /usr/share/doc/xorg-driver-synaptics/ directory (on Ubuntu) contains a kernel patch to modify the alps support in the kernel.
dmesg(8) also shows
[4315892.898000] alps.c: Enabling hardware tapping [4315892.963000] input: PS/2 Mouse on isa0060/serio4 [4315892.976000] input: AlpsPS/2 ALPS GlidePoint on isa0060/serio4
This can be fixed by manually installing a newer version of the synaptics driver. The changelog for breezy's xorg-driver-synaptics package shows:
xorg-driver-synaptics (0.14.3+revertedto+0.13.6-0ubuntu1) breezy; urgency=low
* Revert to old upstream version for preview at least, as the new was quite
catastrophically broken with ALPS. Fixed some, broke a lot (closes:
Ubuntu#14480).
Anyway, instructions for installing the newer version from source are 
here.
The new driver will move the mouse much more slowly than the normal PS/2 driver, so make sure you set the other options for scroll speeds.
If you are using Ubuntu 5.10 ("Breezy") and aren't comfortable with compiling software, and you trust us, you can grab a pre-compiled version (for x86 computers) from our software archive
and copy this into the /usr/X11R6/lib/modules/input/ directory. (It's probably a good idea to back up the existing file.)
One page links to PavilionNotes:
