h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Just wanted to share my breakthrough with Puppy Linux 4.1.2 on a Compaq Presario 700 laptop, especially as mouse & touchpad problems seem to be quite common.

Amazingly (for a fussy laptop), most things worked straight 'out of the box' (i.e. when booted from CD): Display, Internet, Sound, USB mem sticks, Touchpad, but there were a few niggles with the touchpad and external mice.

Touchpad:-
Default behaviour is both Tapping & Scrolling enabled.
I've never liked tapping, but had not come across 'scrolling' on a touchpad before, and it was some time before I worked out why the internet browser kept returning to previous pages seemingly by itself....so now I don't like scrolling either

To turn both of these 'features' off, add the following line to the Synaptics mouse section in /etc/X11/xorg.conf:-
Option "TouchpadOff" "2"

PS/2 Mouse
Tried several different makes, but none of them worked

USB Mouse
1. PC-Line mouse partly worked: move left, right, up and both buttons were ok, but not move down, so unusable.

2. Mini optical mouse of unknown make (came in a USB accessory pack along with retractable extension & converter cables). This worked ok, but movement was too fast. Needed to tame it by adding the following lines to the USB Mouse section in xorg.conf:-
"Sensitivity" "0.3"
"Resolution" "64"
I believe the resolution controls the acceleration (higher=faster), and sensitivity is the speed, although when I tried 0.1, XWindows failed to start, so left it at 0.3

All in all, am very impressed with how far Linux has come, especially the ability to boot from a CD so you can test it without damaging your old OS; remember trying it years ago and ditching it as everything (display, mouse, network etc.) seemed to need tweaking.
Have tried DSL & XUbuntu, but decided to go for Puppy which is now installed on the hard disc and being used to write this
There's lots of helpful info on the web, but be prepared to spend a lot of time sifting through it all!
Phil (becoming a convert).

P.S. Just for completeness, here are the relevant sections from xorg.conf:-

Section "ServerLayout"
InputDevice "Synaptics Mouse" "AlwaysCore"
Identifier "X.org Configured"
Screen 0 "Screen0" 0 0
InputDevice "Mouse0" "CorePointer"
InputDevice "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Keyboard0"
Driver "kbd"
Option "XkbRules" "xorg"
Option "XkbModel" "pc102"
Option "XkbLayout" "gb" #xkeymap0
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Mouse0"
Driver "mouse"
Option "Protocol" "IMPS/2" #mouse0protocol
Option "Device" "/dev/mouse"
Option "Sensitivity" "0.3"
Option "Resolution" "256" #higher=faster
#Option "Emulate3Buttons"
#Option "Emulate3Timeout" "50"
#Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5" #scrollwheel
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Synaptics Mouse"
Driver "synaptics"
Option "Device" "/dev/psaux"
Option "Protocol" "auto-dev"
Option "LeftEdge" "1700"
Option "RightEdge" "5300"
Option "TopEdge" "1700"
Option "BottomEdge" "4200"
Option "FingerLow" "25"
Option "FingerHigh" "30"
Option "MaxTapTime" "0"
Option "MaxTapMove" "220"
Option "VertScrollDelta" "100"
Option "HorizScrollDelta" "100"
Option "MinSpeed" "0.10"
Option "MaxSpeed" "0.30"
Option "AccelFactor" "0.0030"
Option "SHMConfig" "on"
Option "TouchpadOff" "2"
#Option "Repeater" "/dev/ps2mouse"
EndSection