How do I enable multi touch on a Dell inspiron n5110 with an ALPS touchpad?

Question

How can I enable touch pad gestures(multi touch effects) of alps touch pad which comes with dell inspiron n5110 in ubuntu 11.10. These gestures worked fine with windows.

Answer 1

This blog post contains instructions for installing patched mouse drivers, which enable correct recognition of your touchpad: http://nwoki.wordpress.com/2012/10/02/multitouch-fix-for-alps-touchpad/ Even this is a little outdated, as there have been several updates to the drivers since.

In short: Download psmouse-alps-1.3: http://www.dahetral.com/public-download/psmouse-alps-1.3.tbz/view Then (using sudo / root):

• Extract the folder psmouse-alps-1.3 to /usr/source
• cd to /usr/source
• dkms add psmouse-alps-1.3
• dkms autoinstall
• rmmod psmouse && modprobe psmouse

Bam! Working multitouch! :-)

Possible duplicate: Enable two-finger scrolling on ALPS touchpad

Answer 2

If you want to enable your Dell Inspiron 15R Touchpad:

• download that alps-dkms package and install it in /usr/src.
• from a terminal, navigate to /usr/src/psmouse-alps-0.10/src and then gedit alps.c
• in alps.c scroll down and copy the /* Dell Vostro 1400 */ line completely. In that line you will have to replace first 3 matches, that is , replace 0x73 , 0x02 , 0x50 with 0x73 , 0x03 , 0x50 .
• Save the file and return to the terminal. In the terminal type dkms add -m psmouse -v alps-0.10
• After this, type dkms build -m psmouse -v alps-0.10
• after build is complete, install it with dkms install -m psmouse -v alps-0.10
• after it installs it successfully, type rmmod psmouse && modprobe psmouse This will reload your psmouse module.
• Next, type xinput --list to see whether it loaded successfully or not. If it shows Alps/PS2 Alps GlidePoint in the xinput , than congrats. And i bet it will show as i got it working by this! If you need complete patched module , you can ask me :)