Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

I guess I should at least mention the problems I have (on this new laptop) still -- though they are workable, or have workarounds. The three areas that were problematic were:

1. wifi card support
2.) touchpad support
3.) screen support
4.) speaker sound

#1 has been handled after later kernel and additional driver and firmware adjustments
#2 (synaptics touchpad) works also after above, however still fails at times and requires rebooting the laptop to straighten out
#3 screen is good, except in WINE, where there is a continuing bug (in all pup/dog/easyOS distros tested) in OpenGl/MESA.
#4 speaker sound (headphone sound works) -- currently still non-functional

If #2 and #3 found solutions in a v5 of F96-CE I'd be overjoyed. #4 is not that important to me.

(I do have a workaround for #3 by not using WINE sometimes, and using QEMU Win7 VM)

So the greatest improvement for me would be in improved touchpad support (#2).

In testing various pup/dog distros so far, I found the best touchpad support for this very new laptop was in JammyPup64. It was the most stable, and caused the least sudden jump errors, and the cursor wouldn't get stuck (as it does periodically in F96-CE v4).

I'm not sure what is different about touchpad handling in Jammy pup, but I believe that it may use a different handler. There seem to be several basic handler mechanisms for touchpads that can be used, (libinput, evdev, synaptics, xorg) and I believe the present Jammy pup uses different methods than F96-CE v.4. At any rate, this laptop touchpad works much better with that pup for some reason. (However other problems with wifi made that distro presently unusable for me).

Really thorough descriptions of touchpad handling are located on archlinux wiki entries like here:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Touchpad_Synaptics
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/libinput

I need to correct my use of the word "touchpad" above: mine is I guess a "clickpad", not a touchpad. Apparently the distinction lies in whether you can see discreet "mouse" buttons near the pad. If the pad is smooth with no additional buttons, then it's a clickpad. However (to confuse things further) some clickpads have buttons beneath the pad, and some do not. If you depress part of the clickpad and feel a button click, it is the latter type of clickpad. Some have one button under, some have two. And some don't have buttons.

Clickpads are often set up so that different areas of the pad can be tapped to produce different effects. I have a clickpad with at least one button under. It may have two, but I can't actually determine whether clicking the right side affects a second physical button, or is just a regionally mapped alternate response to the single button.

I'm not going to get deeper into this, because it isn't the purpose of the thread. I just wanted to clarify that I was speaking about a clickpad, not a touchpad, and there are differences re. implementation.

Isn't this the objective of most/all forum distros?