What is the cause for the degradation of environment?
Capitalism, corruption, consuming society? - OVERPOPULATION!
Please, save the Planet - kill yourself...

Sunday, July 17, 2011

Two Fingers Scrolling Issue Turned to be an Awesome Feature (HP ProBook 4520s with openSUSE 11.4)

We've  bought HP ProBook 4520s for my wife recently. It came with SLED 11 SP1 preinstalled. The hardware and preinstalled software worked just fine, but due to the lack of the software in repositories designed for SLED, lack of information in web about it's several aspects it was decided that openSUSE 11.4 should be installed. So now it is much easier to get needed software, but on the other hand hardware issues appeared. Drivers from official HP site available only for SLED, so there are issues with WiFi button, "Unsupported hardware" watermark from AMD, and the most annoying - flawed two fingers scrolling. 

The issue is that two finger scrolling works ones in a 20 attempts or so, which means it is completely useless, and emulation of the right mouse button click (which requires two fingers as well) is challenging and you will need some training to perform it. "Psynaptics" installation brought no help, guess touch pad drivers settings need some customization... I was too bored to search for solution. But occasionally I was able to find a workaround for this issue: you just have to use your thumb (its outer side) instead! Seems the length of the continuous flesh  matters. This move is quite natural and actually is more convenient than two finger usage because you don't have to change position of your hand, and wrist stays where it lies! The same benefit is for the right mouse button click emulation - you just tap with the outer side of your thumb - this shit was never easier before! The minor bug became an awesome feature!

There is no way I would want to fix initial issue from this moment! :-)

That's how it looks like:
Right mouse button emulation (click to view animation)
Scrolling (click to view animation)


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