My Dell Mini Forum

jayk · 02:31 AM

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This is an old thread, run NBI for the newest Touchpad Driver

Hello all,

I have a Dell Mini 10v with Mac OS X on it. Much thanks to the Dell EFI crew, (meklort, et al.) I, like many others on the forum have had issues with the trackpad. (which is a nice way of saying it drove me F$#*ing nuts.) Fortunately, I've done some trackpad development before and I decided to hack up the existing trackpad driver.

So... I have a trackpad driver that works tons better than the default one and cures the nasty jumpy-ness that drives so many crazy. It's not perfect, and could use some cleanup, but I wanted to offer it to anyone who was interested in trying it.

I've sent the source code to meklort and I believe he is planning to incorporate some of the changes into the next release in some form or other, but as this is a major issue for a lot of folks, I figured I'd let the adventurous have a go at it...

The patched kext is here:

http://ion0.com/hx/ApplePS2Controller.kext.zip

Make a backup of your existing one from /Extra/Mini9Ext and place this one in it's place, and then run the UpdateExtra app - Reboot and you should be good.

This does assume that you've already installed v18 - so you have the prefpane for tweaking the settings.

I'd love to hear how it works for anyone brave enough to try it.

JayK

bmcclure937 · 09-01-2009, 12:24 PM

Thanks

Will give this a try some time and see how I like it!! Do you mind explaining in a little bit more detail what was changed. This may make people feel more comfortable testing it if they had an explanation of what they are jumping into!

jayk · 01:51 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by bmcclure937

Do you mind explaining in a little bit more detail what was changed. This may make people feel more comfortable testing it if they had an explanation of what they are jumping into!

Absolutely. I basically added a 'big jump' check which detects when the trackpad thinks your are zooming your finger across the pad. When it sees this it squashes the movement. It effectively kills the jitter / jump that you get with the existing driver. I also added some smoothing code to smooth out the pointer movement in general, and a new algorithm that handles movement at very slow speeds.

Overall, the purpose is to make the pointer behave a little better. I'm sure it could be integrated better but I didn't want to redo more of the driver than I needed to.

If you're interested, the actual patch to the existing driver source code is here:

http://ion0.com/hx/jayk-TouchPad-Jump-patch.txt

If you get the driver from here.

mydellmini - Project Hosting on Google Code

and apply the patch above, you'll get the kext I shared in my first post. (Note my patch is prepared against rev 135, I haven't tested applying it after the most recent changes. I don't know that it will make a difference, but if you try to apply the patch to the source and it won't work, try pulling revision 135 and trying again.)

Good luck!

Jay

bmcclure937 · 09-01-2009, 02:17 PM

Awesome

Thanks for the info. Did you have any thought about looking into the annoyances regarding the bottom portion of the touchpad where the tactile buttons reside? That seems to be a headache most people have as well.

Also, does your driver support side scrolling (vertical) and bottom scrolling (horizontal) or 2 finger scrolling?

Just curious! Thanks!

jcoll81 · 09-01-2009, 02:23 PM

I'm definitely going to be trying this out tonight.

bmcclure937 · 09-01-2009, 02:31 PM

I am going to move this thread into the OSX Development Subforum.

I will change the thread title to reflect the fact that this is for the 10v and will leave a redirect from the current subforum

jayk · 09-01-2009, 03:06 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by bmcclure937

Awesome

Thanks for the info. Did you have any thought about looking into the annoyances regarding the bottom portion of the touchpad where the tactile buttons reside? That seems to be a headache most people have as well.

Also, does your driver support side scrolling (vertical) and bottom scrolling (horizontal) or 2 finger scrolling?

Just curious! Thanks!

This jumpiness patch for all intents and purposes fixes the button-click jumping problems, and it does so without disabling the lower portion of the pad. You can actually hold down the tactile button and drag with your other finger on another part of the pad.

I did not change the scrolling code, so the edge scrolling code that was in v18 is what is in here, though it has never worked particularly well for me. I suspect that there is some interaction with the old scrolling code and the new jump-squashing code, but I haven't figured it out yet.

I've implemented 2 finger scrolling before on this type of touchpad, but the code is significantly different than the driver I worked on before, and I'm not sure I could implement it without significantly changing a large portion of the driver. I'm willing to take a shot at it, but I know meklort is/was working on that and I don't want to step on his toes.

JayK

bmcclure937 · 09-01-2009, 03:13 PM

Once again, thanks for the details

I do not think it would be "stepping on his toes" if you both collaborated and came up with a universal solution that would make the trackpad on the 10v the best it possibly can be.

I like the direction you are heading in and I know meklort has started doing some development as well. I am not sure the progress meklort has made, since he is probably occupied by Snow Leopard at this point

(which is a good & bad thing)

I am really excited to hear about the development being made and will give this a try tonight [as long as I remember!]

bsoplinger1 · 09-01-2009, 04:01 PM

Since I use my mini9 as a 2nd computer and often just have it with me (although I do have a nice [2 different ones actually] BT mouse for it) the trackpad issue is all that keeps me from replacing it with a 10v. I tried the 10v trackpad at Best Buy and it was awful and that was with the XP drivers made for it. I can only just imagine what its like with the current crop of drivers.

You'll be my hero if you can make a usable 10v trackpad.

Yuusou · 09-01-2009, 04:55 PM

I read I have to have v18 installed. Any info on what is that and most importantly where I can download it?