(this article has moved here)
The next problem after upgrading my Fedora to Core 2 came from the fact that my Synaptics Touchpad (Acer Travelmate 202TE notebook) refused to accept any touch-events. I had faced this problem before, when I was trying kernel 2.6.x, but because I decided not to use that kernel until it becomes official to Fedora Core 2, I did not considered that as a problem then.
But now – it was really annoying. Touchpad was working (cursor was moving fine), but touch-events (tap = click for example) were not working fine. I had to look for a solution!
The Google query returned me plenty of results. At least I could see that someone else had also troubles with 2.6.x kernels and that touchpad. The advice (to this Mandrake user) was to download and install the original driver. Another advice (search for Synaptics there – this is a long FAQ) told to add “psmouse.proto=imps” to my kernel startup command line in order to restore 2.4 behavior. I hate this solution, so I had to go for the driver.

1. I downloaded the driver, and built it. I copied resulting synaptics_drv.o to the right place (as INSTALL said, it was /usr/X11R6/lib/modules/input/ – no matter that FC2 uses XOrg instead of XFree).
2. Now it was time to /etc/X11/XF86Config modifications. I added

   Load "synaptics"

   to my “Module” section.

3. I added the whole group of settings for my new input device. I decided to rename the device to Synaptics0 instead of “Synaptics Mouse” as INSTALL suggests.
4. I added the new Pointer devices. I changed the “CorePointer” of existing “Mouse0” to “AlwaysCore”, because I was planning to use from time to time also PS/2 mouse. Now my XF86Config lines look like:

   InputDevice    "Mouse0" "AlwaysCore" # "CorePointer"
   InputDevice    "Synaptics0"  "AlwaysCore" # "CorePointer"

5. It seems the default Fedora Core 2 kernel comes precompiled with all needed options for the driver, so no kernel compilation was additionally necessary. Both CONFIG_MOUSE_PS2 and CONFIG_INPUT_EVDEV are set to “y” in /boot/config-2.6.5-1.358 file
6. Restart of the X and – OMG – it was working again. I connected also PS/2 mouse to check (after restart) if it will work too – and I was charmed! All seems fine for now – I also plan to use this gui configuration program for the touchpad, but this will be a bit later.