[FreeBSD-Announce] FreeBSD 12.0 end-of-life

[Per Hedeland]

On 2020-02-21 06:08, Tomasz CEDRO wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 21, 2020 at 1:52 AM Per Hedeland <per at hedeland.org> wrote:
>> Anyway, a bit of searching in the ports tree indicated that it was
>> sysutils/iichid, and after building/installing/loading it, plus
>> loading ig4, installing x11-drivers/xf86-input-libinput, and adding
>> the suggested xorg.conf snippet (adjusted per output from 'libinput
>> list-devices') - the touchpad works! (At least to the extent that I
>> care to use it.)
>
> This is clearly something that is very missing in the Handbook / WIKI
> / synaptics manpages!
>
> I always gave FreeBSD as an example of perfectly documented project.
>
> Does not seem applicable anymore. Documentation is out of sync and
> "works for me" solutions are so Linux :-(

Well, as you note below (and also clear from Ed's message), this is
brand new stuff - not handbook material just yet IMHO. But once I was
made aware of the port, it was really quite straightforward to get it
going - I got all the info except the need for xf86-input-libinput
(which wasn't very hard to infer) from the links in the pkg-descr, in
particular the README.md in wulf7's repo.

And I prefer to take the positivie view - this touchpad was completely
dead until I learned of the port, now it works, even though it
requires a bit of tinkering to set up. This is *progress* and *good*
in my book, and I'm sure it will get better/simpler over time. The
same goes for the "new drm" that has seen so much criticism - without
that, X on this laptop (with Intel Kaby Lake something) was completely
impossible, with the "new drm" it pretty much "just worked".

I don't know about the synaptics part - in fact I'm pretty ignorant in
general about the hardware involved.:-) The touchpad is (now)
identified as ELAN0608, is this related to synaptics in any way?

> On the other hand IICHID was released 9 days ago - and finally brings
> standard to USB and I2C HID layer on FreeBSD serving as input for
> evdev and libinput - THANK YOU WULF7 :-)
>
>
>> It has a kind of strange behavior though, might be a feature:-) -
>> if I move the cursor and let go of the touchpad without first stopping
>> the motion, the cursor continues to move on its own...
>
> This is a feature not a bug ;-) However, there should be a decay in
> the scroll speed when you let go scrolling ;-)

This is not scrolling, just moving the cursor/pointer across the
screen - and there is absolutely no decay in the speed, it continues
at the same speed (at least:-) in the direction of the move until it
hits the closest edge of the screen (also continues along that edge
until it reaches a corner). Per above it's pretty easy to avoid by
stopping the motion before letting go of the touchpad, but it does
seem weird...

> You may want to try sysctl, xmodmap, xinput, or gsettings to change /
> tune Touchpad parameters.

I played a bit with the acceleration parameters via 'xinput
--set-ptr-feedback', no effect on this. Do you have any more specific
tips?

--Per