Left Click Drag and Drop with Clickpad/Trackpad

[sortova]

Howdy. First post, so please be gentle.

I'm a big fan of Cinnamon, but I'm having an issue that a couple of days worth of searching has not revealed a solution. I'm using the latest Dell XPS 13 laptop, Ubuntu edition, and I thought I'd be able to run Mint on it.

The issue is how Cinnamon handles drag and drop with the XPS clickpad. The way I like to drag and drop is to click and hold the lower left corner of the clickpad with the index finger of my left hand, and then use the right hand index finger to move the mouse pointer. This works fine with the standard Ubuntu flavors (Ubuntu, Kubuntu and Ubuntu Gnome) but on Cinnamon it drops down a menu, as if it was a right click.

Now by default the clickpad is configured to use the lower left corner as movement and not a button, but I've edited 50-synaptics.conf to disable that feature. In fact, I've compared every Synaptics configuration I could find between a working Ubuntu install and the Mint install and there are no differences. Thus I am thinking it is an issue with Cinnamon.

I even installed the 3.19 kernel (which is what 15.04 is running) on Mint 17.1 with no change. I was hoping 17.2 might fix it, but the RC exhibits the same problem.

So, I apologize for taking up your time, but any suggestions would be appreciated. I'm running Ubuntu Gnome 15.04 right now, and while it is working fairly well (it handles HiDPI screens better than most) I miss my Cinnamon.

[yfisaqt]

I just installed Linux Mint 17.2 (yesterday) on a Dell Inspiron 15 (7000 series 7548). I also like to use the touchpad/clickpad just as you describe. After fighting with things a while, I found this post http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php? ... st13214229 that solved it perfectly. I rebooted after applying the changes (perhaps there's a better way, but I'm still new, too).

To clearly articulate the actual changes I applied that got it working for me:

• I created a new file: /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/52-mymods.conf
• I pasted the following content:

  Code: Select all

  Section "InputClass"
  Identifier "Force Clickpad Config"
  MatchDriver "synaptics"
  Option "ClickPad" "true"
  Option "EmulateMidButtonTime" "0"
  Option "SoftButtonAreas" "50% 0 82% 0 0 0 0 0"
  Option "SecondarySoftButtonAreas" "58% 0 0 15% 42% 58% 0 15%"
  EndSection
  

• I rebooted

Some notes about my configuration: I'm generally cautious about applying random recommended changes to fix problems, so my 50-synaptics.conf file was not modified before applying the above changes (it was whatever it defaults to during a fresh install). I also heard about applying a new kernel, but I wasn't convinced that would help. I'm running 3.16.0-38 (3.16.7-ctk10). This was the default from the fresh install.

[sortova]

Thanks for this. Somehow I missed the post.

However, I just installed 17.3 (Rosa) and everything works fine. Yay!

[uhN0id]

• I created a new file: /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/52-mymods.conf
• I pasted the following content:

  Code: Select all

  Section "InputClass"
  Identifier "Force Clickpad Config"
  MatchDriver "synaptics"
  Option "ClickPad" "true"
  Option "EmulateMidButtonTime" "0"
  Option "SoftButtonAreas" "50% 0 82% 0 0 0 0 0"
  Option "SecondarySoftButtonAreas" "58% 0 0 15% 42% 58% 0 15%"
  EndSection
  

• I rebooted

I wanted to confirm that in 2019 on my t450s running Mint 19.1 this fixed the issue. I no longer have to click the far bottom corner to make click+drag work on the touchpad and I am enjoying my laptop considerably more now! What a big difference!