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Miscellaneous notes for HP Pavilion laptops

DV4000 Series (dv4114AP)

X configuration

See i915-xorg.conf. This machine doesn't support the 1400x1050 widescreen resolution but it looks fine in 1280x800.

On this machine, fn + F4 doesn't change to the SVGA or S/Video output, even though those are configured properly in the xorg.conf file.

Configuring the Touchpad

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). It apparently uses the "alps" protocol. This requires both kernel support (in the psmouse.ko driver) and xorg support (provided by the synaptics driver).

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
...

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

The synaptics driver shipped with xorg in ubuntu breezy doesn't seem to work with this touchpad; this can be fixed by manually installing a newer version of the synaptics driver. (version 0.14 works, 0.13 doesn't). 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.)

CategoryLaptopNotes