Disabling touchpad tapping in Xubuntu Intrepid

I have reinstalled Xubuntu from the Xubuntu iso and it seems to be working fine.

The thing that bugged me the most though was that the touchpad on my vaio laptop was set up for “tapping” by default.

Tapping is something that people either love or hate, and I am in the latter category.

Gnome seems to have the ability to control the touchpad installed by default but Xubuntu uses Xfce rather than Gnome so there are a few tweaks needed to control the touchpad.

A good link is at
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SynapticsTouchpad

I followed the instructions to enable SHMConfig by typing:

gksudo mousepad /etc/hal/fdi/policy/shmconfig.fdi

I then pasted the following text into the file:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<deviceinfo version="0.2">
 <device>
  <match key="input.x11_driver" string="synaptics">
   <merge key="input.x11_options.SHMConfig" type="string">True</merge>
  </match>
 </device>
</deviceinfo>

Then I installed the qsynaptics package using the following command:

sudo aptitude install qsynaptics

After doing this I got a new icon showing in the xfce settings manager that gave me control of the touchpad settings.

Using Skype in Ubuntu Intrepid

I have been trying to get Skype set up on my Vaio Laptop running Ubuntu 8.10 and I thought it would be straightforward. I was a bit worried that the Skype download page offered Ubuntu 7.04-8.04 as I’m on 8.10!

Luckily this did not seem to matter as the “.deb” file seemed to install fine by double clicking it. The tricky bit was getting the microphone to work.

In the skype “audio settings” I used: Sound In:  HDA Intel (hw:Intel,0) Sound Out:  Pulse Ringing:  Pulse

I then ran gnome-volume-control and set it like this

One thing I did notice was the input source dropdown list acted a bit odd as it would say “Mic” but that setting might not have registered properly so changing it to something else then changing it back to “Mic” again seemed to make it register.

Also the settings don’t seem to “stick” so that when I reboot I have to reselect “Mic” again!