Peter Osterlund replied to me:
2. Also in Input device support, there is a section on Mice, PS/2 mouse,The synaptics kernel driver doesn't try to recognize alps touchpads.
and Synaptics TouchPad. These I compiled in and they don't seem to be
causing any problems. It seems that the Alps TouchPad is being recognized
as an Intelli/Wheel mouse instead of being recognized as a Synaptics
TouchPad, which is unfortunate but not really causing any problems. I've
read that Synaptics is most common in foreign countries but Alps is most
common in Japan.
I guess that explains why the Synaptics driver didn't cause any problems
:-)
However, in the XFree86 driver
http://w1.894.telia.com/~u89404340/touchpad/index.html
there is a kernel patch (alps.patch) that makes the kernel recognize
alps touchpads and generate data compatible with the XFree86 synaptics
driver.
Looking at that page, I'll guess that SuSE 8.2's version of XFree86 probably
already has that patch, because under X the touchpad is performing more than
half of those operations correctly already.
It doesn't work perfectly though, at least not for some hardware. The
problem seems to be how to interpret the gesture bit in the alps mouse
packets.
That's OK, Alps supplies notebook vendors with drivers for Monopolysoft
OSes, and it seems that Alps hasn't completely got this working correctly
either.
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