[arch-general] Alps touchpad problems

[mike cloaked]

I am trying to get a laptop touchpad working properly with arch fully
up to date as of today. The machine is a recent Dell Vostro and has an
Alps touchpad. I can't get vertical scrolling to work in KDE, and the
mouse cursor occasionally moves erratically.

I have seen previous posts some time back recommending installing the
psmouse-alps package from AUR, and indeed it would appear that the 3.3
kernel may have a working psmouse module. However for the moment with
kernel 3.2.5 the touchpad is detected as P/S 2 Generic - instead of
the correct detection.

I have tried installing psmouse-alps and rebooting but it made no
difference so I uninstalled it again.

the Xorg log has:

[    16.850] (II) config/udev: Adding input device PS/2 Generic Mouse (/dev/inpu
t/event8)
[    16.850] (**) PS/2 Generic Mouse: Applying InputClass "evdev pointer catchal
l"
[    16.850] (II) Using input driver 'evdev' for 'PS/2 Generic Mouse'
[    16.850] (II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/input/evdev_drv.so
[    16.850] (**) PS/2 Generic Mouse: always reports core events
[    16.850] (**) PS/2 Generic Mouse: Device: "/dev/input/event8"
[    16.850] (--) PS/2 Generic Mouse: Found 3 mouse buttons
[    16.850] (--) PS/2 Generic Mouse: Found relative axes
[    16.850] (--) PS/2 Generic Mouse: Found x and y relative axes
[    16.850] (II) PS/2 Generic Mouse: Configuring as mouse
[    16.850] (**) PS/2 Generic Mouse: YAxisMapping: buttons 4 and 5
[    16.850] (**) PS/2 Generic Mouse: EmulateWheelButton: 4,
EmulateWheelInertia: 10, EmulateWheelTimeout: 200
[    16.850] (**) Option "config_info"
"udev:/sys/devices/platform/i8042/serio1/input/input8/event8"
[    16.850] (II) XINPUT: Adding extended input device "PS/2 Generic
Mouse" (type: MOUSE, id 12)
[    16.850] (II) PS/2 Generic Mouse: initialized for relative axes.
[    16.850] (**) PS/2 Generic Mouse: (accel) keeping acceleration scheme 1
[    16.850] (**) PS/2 Generic Mouse: (accel) acceleration profile 0
[    16.851] (**) PS/2 Generic Mouse: (accel) acceleration factor: 2.000
[    16.851] (**) PS/2 Generic Mouse: (accel) acceleration threshold: 4
[    16.851] (II) config/udev: Adding input device PS/2 Generic Mouse
(/dev/input/mouse0)
[    16.851] (II) No input driver specified, ignoring this device.
[    16.851] (II) This device may have been added with another device file.

Does anyone have current experience with this issue and know the best
way to work around the problem until the 3.3 kernel is released?

Thanks

-- 
mike c