Monthly Archives: July 2008

Custom build of synaptics for Fedora 8 x86_64 on MacBook

Based on the patches found in this post over at Ubuntu forums I have created an updated synaptics touchpad driver RPM package for Fedora 8 x86_64.

As the original author notes, this makes it more enjoyable to use the touchpad while using the MacBook. It does two things:

  1. Adds the option “MultiFingerButton” to synaptics. This allows us to configure the touchpad to right-click and middle-click by placing two or three fingers on the pad and then clicking the button. In my experience this is far more reliable than the “two finger tap” method of right-clicking.
  2. It makes the mouse arrow more stable – I have found this to be a HUGE improvement in usability over the stock synaptics driver. With the original driver, if you put two fingers on the mousepad and release only one, the mouse arrow moves. This is the default behaviour in Linux and Windows, but in MacOSX, the mouse arrow stays put, and in my personal opinion, this is a much better behaviour. This patch makes it behave just like MacOSX. This may not sound much, but you’ll find it makes a huge difference to the stability and usability of the touchpad.

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Fedora 8 x86_64 fixes for battery being reported twice error

The latest 2.6.25.x Fedora 8 kernels have both ACPI_PROCFS_POWER and ACPI_SYSFS_POWER turned on and this can cause a strange problem with HAL which results in it incorrectly displaying the same battery twice and reporting incorrect charge levels for the “bogus” battery. This in turn creates problems with power management software such as kpowersave and gnome-power-manager.

I have only seen this reported on some specific x86_64 machines but it may affect other architectures too.

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Banshee 1.0 RPM for Fedora 8 x86_64

Banshee Media PlayerBanshee 1.0 was released on June 5 2008. At the time of writing I haven’t been able to find an official Fedora 8 RPM build so I have built my own using the Fedora 9 source RPM and made it available here for you to download and install.

For those that don’t know, Banshee is a great multimedia player for Linux with support for iPod syncing, podcasts, streaming radio, video and lots more. For iPod owners Banshee is one of few viable Linux alternatives to iTunes.

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