Touchpad requires you to press really hard on MacBook 2.1

Question

On my white MacBook 2.1 I have to press to my finger really hard to the touchpad to even move the mouse pointer. I did not have to do that when I had OSX installed on it.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

A lot of people with Macbook varieties have installed alternate drivers for the trackpad so they can modify them to their hearts' content. In my case, I installed xf86-input-mtrack driver. To install it, at the terminal type:

sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-input-mtrack  

Put in password as usual when prompted.

Now you need to actually switch from the old driver (called "multitouch") to this one. You will need to put some entries in /etc/X11/xorg.conf

sudo nano /etc/X11/xorg.conf 

Put in:

    Section "InputClass"
        MatchIsTouchpad          "on"
        Identifier               "Touchpads"
        Driver                   "mtrack"
    EndSection

This is the bare minimum you need in the conf file. You will undoubtedly want to now experiment and tweak it until the driver gets to the Goldilocks "just right" stage.

Here is the readme by the author of the driver: https://github.com/BlueDragonX/xf86-input-mtrack/blob/master/README.md

It explains the different options. Here's an example, using my conf:

     Section "InputClass"
          MatchIsTouchpad    "on"
          Identifier         "Touchpads"
          Driver             "mtrack"
          Option             "Sensitivity"           ".67"
          Option             "TapButton1"            "0"
          Option             "TapButton2"            "0"
          Option             "TapButton3"            "0"
          Option             "ScrollDistance"        "100"
          Option             "FingerHigh"            "8"
          Option             "FingerLow"             "8"
      EndSection

I don't like any of the tapping business, so I turned them off. FingerHigh is what you are most interested in. Default value is 5. It defines the minimum pressure the touchpad will recognize as a touch. As you can see, I found it very sensitive, so I set it to 8.

Now reboot. If all goes well, you've fixed your problem. It's that easy (or at least, it should be -- knock on wood).

Finally, a discussion thread started by the driver author is here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1730361

A fair amount of the info in there is outdated, not applicable, or in some cases wrong (some examples of the xorg.conf files mistakenly have "multitouch" where "mtrack" should be). But the initial post is worth reading as it explains the author created dispad to work with the driver, for those who accidentally touch trackpad a lot while typing. I don't have that problem, so I didn't install dispad, but maybe you will need it.