Custom Kernel for openSUSE 11.2 on MacBook Pro 5,1

While openSUSE 11.2 works great on the MacBook Pro 5,1 (late 2008) the trackpad driver is missing some features that are present on Mac OS X. This howto shows a solution that improves trackpad support significantly.

Click and Drag:

The new trackpad does not have a button anymore. Instead the whole trackpad can be pressed. On OS X this works great. Linux unfortunately doesn’t fully support the touchpad right now. A feature that is not supported right now is click and drag with multiple fingers. If you want to move a window or drag files you usually click and keep the button pressed with one finger while moving the mouse curser to the desired destination with another finger. Doing so with the button-less touchpad results in wrong behavior. The driver detects two fingers on the pad and interprets the movement as scrolling gesture.

Solution:

I couldn’t find a configuration option to change the behavior of the driver. But I found an Ubuntu bug report that contained a patch that allows click and drag.

Links: [1] and [2]

Based on the patch I compiled a Kernel using 2.6.31.5-0.1-default config. I created a x8664 kernel RPM and the corresponding source package.

Download:

You can either download a precompiled kernel RPM (x8664) or the source RPM (src.rpm).