Tuesday, September 6, 2016

Fedora: Cinnamon, MATE and the broken GNOME touchpad panel

On Fedora, if you have mate-desktop or cinnamon-desktop installed, your GNOME touchpad configuration panel won't work (see Bug 1338585). Both packages install a symlink to assign the synaptics driver to the touchpad. But GNOME's control-center does not support synaptics anymore, so no touchpad is detected. Note that the issue occurs regardless of whether you use MATE/Cinnamon, merely installing it is enough.

Unfortunately, there is no good solution to this issue. Long-term both MATE and Cinnamon should support libinput but someone needs to step up and implement it. We don't support run-time driver selection in the X server, so an xorg.conf.d snippet is the only way to assign a touchpad driver. And this means that you have to decide whether GNOME's or MATE/Cinnamon's panel is broken at X start-up time.

If you need the packages installed but you're not actually using Mate/Cinnamon itself, remove the following symlinks (whichever is present on your system):

# rm /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/99-synaptics-mate.conf
# rm /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/99-synaptics-cinnamon.conf
# rm /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/99-synaptics-mate.conf
# rm /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/99-synaptics-cinnamon.conf
The /usr/share paths are the old ones and have been replaced with the /etc/ symlinks in cinnamon-desktop-3.0.2-2.fc25 and mate-desktop-1.15.1-4.fc25 and their F24 equivalents.

1 comment:

Mel. said...

Peter,

Do you have any idea how to get natural scrolling or inverse scrolling working in GTK3 applications? I did the "pointer = 1 2 3 5 4 7 6 8 9 10 11 12" xmodmap command and this works for pretty much every application including Chromium, Firefox etc but it does not work for pretty much all GTK3 apps. Is there a way to tell GTK3 apps to follow xinput rules?
Thanks!