david stanek's digressions

When I upgraded to the gentoo-sources-2.6.12-r9 kernel I started to have mouse troubles. I was no longer able to double tap to select text or to select and move windows. If that was not anoyinig enough, the mouse would randomly click things as I moved the cursor around. My laptop's ALPS Touchpad seemed to be detected ok and the AlpsPS/2 driver was automatically loaded. Some Google searches revealed that this was the problem and that the AlpsPS/2 driver had an issue with hardware tapping. It seems that I could either use the synaptic device driver or I change the boot options in my grub.conf. I thought that using the driver would be the best option so I followed the instructions I found here. Adding event interface support to my kernel caused my wlan-ng drivers to completely freeze my laptop when the module was loaded. I didn't have the time to find out what was really going on so I deciced to try changing my grub.conf. After adding 'psmouse.proto=imps' to my boot options in grup.conf the mouse started to work correctly. I'll probably end up revisiting the synaptic driver eventually, but for now a working mouse of good enough.