Configuring Alps laptop touch pad

Here mainly for my own historical notes (but if you happen to drop in here via google - you're most welcome!) is how I configured my Alps touch pad to do tap clicks, middle button and scrolling etc... First of you'll need dkms

sudo apt-get install dkms

dkms is rather handy and will automagically(tm) compile and install from source code kernel modules when you install/upgrade a kernel package... You'll need the source from http://www.dahetral.com/public-download at the time of writing the source is at version 1.3. You should end up with the source in usr/src/psmouse-alps-1.3 if you like this can be a symlink to your own development folder... It behoves me to thank both the original creator and current contributors of this and wonder why it isn't just part of the kernel source.... Then its just a case of telling dkms where it is and to get on with it...

sudo dkms add psmouse/alps-1.3
sudo dkms autoinstall
sudo rmmod psmouse
sudo modprobe psmouse

Just a quick note - while you can sudo su and execute the above commands without sudo, I prefer not to as its all too easy to forget to exit the su session and end up doing unintended things still using the root account... While there are skeleton Xorg configs to use in /usr/share I found a more comprehensive example below - while not all of the features work on my hardware they might work for others... On Debian testing (jessie) I had to create the following directory

 sudo mkdir /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d

into which I dropped the following config file (50-synaptics.conf)

Section "InputClass"
 Identifier "Touchpad" # required
 MatchIsTouchpad "yes" # required
 Driver "synaptics" # required
 Option "MinSpeed" "0.5"
 Option "MaxSpeed" "1.0"
 Option "AccelFactor" "0.075"
 Option "TapButton1" "1"
 Option "TapButton2" "2" # multitouch
 Option "TapButton3" "3" # multitouch
 Option "VertTwoFingerScroll" "1" # multitouch
 Option "HorizTwoFingerScroll" "1" # multitouch
 Option "VertEdgeScroll" "1"
 Option "CoastingSpeed" "8"
 Option "CornerCoasting" "1"
 Option "CircularScrolling" "1"
 Option "CircScrollTrigger" "7"
 Option "EdgeMotionUseAlways" "1"
 Option "LBCornerButton" "8" # browser "back" btn
 Option "RBCornerButton" "9" # browser "forward" btn
EndSection

You should only need to restart your xorg session (log out and back in) but if you want to be paranoid you can do a windows (reboot) While corner buttons don't work for me, the useful bits like 2 finger scrolling and best of all middle and right mouse button clicks (2 or 3 finger tap) all work great! double tap and drag all in one gesture will also allow selecting too. Enjoy!