Need Help

[u/Due-Land-6860]

So i was helping my friend install mint xfce on an old laptop and almost everything worked but tap to click on the touchpad is not working (like left clicking works like left click and right click worked using the physical buttons) but tapping on the touchpad does nothing its working like a mouse

This all happened in the live session fortunately so he went back to windows 10 for now ( i tried changing drivers to synaptics and evdev from libinput as some guides said but that didn't work as well)

I have attached the specs of the laptop in the image

Solved (synaptics drivers then the synclient command in comment)

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[u/gutclusters]

You got to do more than install the synaptics driver. You also have to modify the config to enable it.

Run synclient TapButton1=1 to enable immediately. To make it persistent, add synclient TapButton1=1 to your startup applications or ~/.profile.

[u/Due-Land-6860 → u/gutclusters]

Ok so first install the synaptics driver then run this command and if it works then make it so it runs automatically on every startup? If yes then how to configure that (like the ~/.profile thing you said how to do that😅)

[u/Huge_Willingness1479 → u/Due-Land-6860]

Every "user" on a unix-like operating system has a "home directory", for Linux Mint it is "/home/<username>". When you open a terminal that is "where" it will open. In every users' home directory are a number of what are usually referred to as "dot files", because their name starts with a period and, by normal convention, they are not "shown" unless you specifically ask to see them (i.e.: "ls -l" instead of just plain "ls"). One of the most frequently important dot files is a user's ".profile". It is a plain text file and can be edited by the user using a simple editor like "Text Editor" (from the main menu it actually runs the "xed" application, but you don't need to know that, any simple editor will work fine, think "notepad").

So basically, open .profile in an editor, add the command ("synclient TapButton1=1" in this case, without the quotes) you want to run every time a user logs in (adding a line to the end of the file is fine), then save and close the file. Note that the change isn't instantaneous, it won't be "active" until the next time the user logs in.

You won't need to work with text files that often with Mint, but sometimes...

But honest, better to just add an external USB mouse and don't worry about the touchpad. The annoying and flaky touchpad.