Three finger swipe not working on Thinkpad t580

Ask Fedora
1

Hi to all, I recently discovered that I can’t use gestures in Gnome. I’m currently using F34 on a ThinkPad t580.
Unfortunately, three finger touch is not working on this laptop.
I verified the hardware booting in Windows and it works.
I found this old discussion about the topics:

so I did:

# grub2-editenv /boot/grub2/grubenv set kernelopts="nouveau.blacklist=1 rd.driver.blacklist=nouveau modprobe.blacklist=nouveau nvidia-drm.modeset=1 psmouse.synaptics_intertouch=1"
# dracut -f

and edit /etc/default/grub

GRUB_TIMEOUT=5
GRUB_DISTRIBUTOR="$(sed 's, release .*$,,g' /etc/system-release)"
GRUB_DEFAULT=saved
GRUB_DISABLE_SUBMENU=true
GRUB_TERMINAL_OUTPUT="console"
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="rd.driver.blacklist=nouveau modprobe.blacklist=nouveau nvidia-drm.modeset=1 rhgb quiet rd.driver.blacklist=nouveau modprobe.blacklist=nouveau nvidia-drm.modeset=1 psmouse.synaptics_intertouch=1"
GRUB_DISABLE_RECOVERY="true"
GRUB_ENABLE_BLSCFG=true

but nothing happened.

here the output of dmesg | grep synaptic

dmesg | grep synaptic
[    1.944495] psmouse serio1: synaptics: queried max coordinates: x [..5676], y [..4690]
[    1.977550] psmouse serio1: synaptics: queried min coordinates: x [1266..], y [1162..]
[    1.977558] psmouse serio1: synaptics: Trying to set up SMBus access
[    1.980441] psmouse serio1: synaptics: SMbus companion is not ready yet
[    2.045492] psmouse serio1: synaptics: Touchpad model: 1, fw: 8.16, id: 0x1e2b1, caps: 0xf01fa3/0x940300/0x12e800/0x400000, board id: 3276, fw id: 2700068
[    2.045502] psmouse serio1: synaptics: serio: Synaptics pass-through port at isa0060/serio1/input0
[    7.780627] psmouse serio1: synaptics: queried max coordinates: x [..5676], y [..4690]
[    7.814042] psmouse serio1: synaptics: queried min coordinates: x [1266..], y [1162..]
[    7.814052] psmouse serio1: synaptics: Trying to set up SMBus access

Many thanks for any suggestion.
Best regards
Paolo

2

Your workaround was for Gnome 3.x. Did you check to login without Wayland?

3

Thanks for your quick reply. I just tried to log with gnome classic (which I suppose is Gnome under Xorg) but three finger swipe doesn’t work. I’ll get back from the old workaround and see dmesg message.

4

Can you check which display server you were using with command:
echo $XDG_SESSION_TYPE

It seems like you were not using Wayland at all, most probably because you installed NVIDIA drivers. Three finger swipe for GNOME only work on Wayland, there are alternatives for Xorg to use gestures, such as touchegg.

NVIDIA driver with version 470+ does support Wayland but extra steps need to be done:

  1. sudoedit /usr/lib/udev/rules.d/61-gdm.rules → comment out the line starting with DRIVER==“nvidia”
  2. Check if WaylandEnable=false is commented out in /etc/gdm/custom.conf
6

I was not conscious I was using Xorg. Your suggestion worked for me! Thank you! Probably I would never find that solution.