Since i couldn’t find anything on the net, here’s a quick howto on how to change the sensitivity of the Synaptics touchpad on a Lenovo Ideapad s10e running ArchLinux. Should probably work on other hardware too, don’t know. A howto on general setup can be found here.

X and hal work pretty much out of the box, but the touchpad is way too sensitive.

To change that, open /etc/hal/fdi/policy/10osvendor/11-x11-synaptics.fdi and add the following three lines:

<merge key=”input.x11_options.SHMConfig” type=”string”>true</merge>
<merge key=”input.x11_options.MinSpeed” type=”string”>0.10</merge>
<merge key=”input.x11_options.MaxSpeed” type=”string”>0.75</merge>

restart hal & X and the touchpad should be much more usable.