Trackpad Woes

I have installed Debian with the Raspbian desktop on an external drive connected to an old mid 2009 MacBook.

[For those of you not familiar with Macs, their trackpad has either a single button or no button at all. in macOS a right-click action is performed by either a Control-click or a two-finger tap. There are other nifty trackpad tapping features on newer Macs, but the 2009 MacBook is limited to only one or two finger taps.]

Two problems showed up immediately on the Raspbian interface: no tapping allowed and no right-click possible. (Well, three problems actually: No Control-click allowed either, but I prefer tapping.)

Once upon a time there was a mouseemu utility that was supposed to address this issue, but it is in the default distribution, it hasn't been updated in ages, and doesn't play well with Stretch.

To make it perfectly clear, I want to be able to do a one or two finger tap on my MacBook's trackpad, and have it perform a left or right click for me. Ideas? If I have to use buttons instead of tapping, I can live with that. But no right-click is a deal breaker. Also, I'd like to avoid having to use an external two-button mouse.

BTW, it's no biggie if the MacBook can't pretend to be a Pi. I have a couple of REAL Raspberry Pis and also Debian Raspbian running well in VirtualBox.

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Reply to
Chris Schram
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There are some hints that look worth pursuing here

formatting link

It would seem that infinite remapping of everything is possible at the X window level.

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Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

I had the exact same situation & problem. Supposedly, this can be solved with the right Synaptic driver. I gave up after 2 days and threw Raspbian Desktop away.

(Then I tried Lubuntu, trackpad good but wifi didn't work and again I couldn't track down the right driver. Binned that, too. Solved it with Mint: trackpad good and it found the wifi driver by itself (so I did need an ethernet cable first.))

Reply to
A. Dumas

...Main problem was when I thought I had found the right driver that it was only available for 64bit and Raspbian is 32bit. Didn't feel like recompiling every time there is a kernel update.

Reply to
A. Dumas

Dont be such a wuss!

Anyway I thought it ws just a matter of relinking...

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Reply to
The Natural Philosopher

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