werle

Every expression is a well calculated piece of art where the lines between science and art blur and the difference between logic and aesthetic no longer differ

I had a lot of issues when upgrading my Asus U47A to Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. Most of which were centered around my touchpad. I use a Mac book for work and have become very accustomed to the gestures provided on the trackpad and wanted the same experience on my Linux OS. I spent a lot of time googling around, forum trolling and straight up Github lurking to solve this damn issue. I often gave up after any hours on each attempt and considered it a lost cause. This morning I woke up with the determination to get this shit done, and the shit has been done!

I’m not going to write a whole “How-to” on getting this up and going, but rather, I will provide the most “up -to-date” links on making this happen.

Step 1 – Build, Install & Configure

A post made by Resa <http://resalxh.wordpress.com/> was the most helpful in getting this started. The guide provides a step by step process to cloning a git repository and building from source the necessary configuration for getting your touchpad to work properly with Synaptics. This process will take about 20 minutes to complete, so be patient. Follow the steps here:
http://resalxh.wordpress.com/2012/09/18/ubuntu-12-04-lts-x64-the-next-step-getting-touchpad-working/

Step 2 – Post-Install configuration (What’s up with my right click?)

After building, installing, configuring, and etc, you are going to need to make sure your right click experience is working properly. A comment provided by VideoRoy <http://ubuntuforums.org/member.php?u=993356> showed the last steps to making this happen. Follow the steps here:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=11877900&postcount=4

Supported Gestures

From a post by Isantop <http://ubuntuforums.org/member.php?u=394913> the following gestures are supported out of the box with this build:

These are supported by all of our current systems:

• Two-finger drag (scrolling)
• Two-finger tap (Right-click)
• Three-finger drag (Move window)
• Three-finger tap (Show Resize handles)

Ubuntu additionally has support for these gestures:

• Three-finger pinch/stretch (Maximize/Restore Window)
• Four-finger drag left/right (Hide/Reveal launcher)
• Four-finger tap (Show/Hide dash)

Find this post here => http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=11802944&postcount=2

 I hope this helps some people as I was bouncing around with this for months now and I finally got it solved. It still seems like Canonical has some work to do to make this work out of the box (I hear 12.10 has solved this).

 

I was asked to fix a few issues a colleague was having with the Engage Widget JavaScript loader that GetSatisfaction has to offer for integration into your site. After reading through their small, but powerful loader.js, I saw that they depended on the classic, yet often forgotten about, window.onload() method to load the needed assets. This seemed standard to me, except the fact that an exposed API call to do just that wasn’t provided! How could they!? Life moves on though..

In their developer community forum you find posts telling you to copy a little snippet and paste it at the end of the document body so it is the last thing to run, but that just seems like a hack to me. I thought it should be a little more OO so it is easier to track manage within our application stack. I decided to hack away and this is what I came up with.

You can find it on Github Gist here -> https://gist.github.com/4156937
You can find it on GetSatisfaction here -> https://getsatisfaction.com/devcommunity/topics/dynamically_load_engage_widgets_with_this_custom_loader

Here is what I’ve hacked together so far, which is production worthy…

P.S. You should always document your code so it is easier to come back to and you don’t end face palming yourself for being the biggest n00b.

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