Pavilion touchpad support (and fingerprint reader)

[jwj]

Hi everyone,

I recently got myself an HP Pavilion DV7 4073nr laptop. First order of business was to wipe the Windows 7 off of it and replace it with Mint 9, which works beautifully. There are two things that I'd like to improve, but I haven't been able to find the information I need, so maybe someone here can help:

(1) The Pavilion touchpad has a feature that allows it to be turned off by pushing in its top left corner for 2s. I was wondering whether there is a way to support this in Linux --- I use touchfreeze, and it helps avoiding accidental uses of the touchpad, but ideally I'd like the ability to simply turn it off manually. It would be fine if this were done differently, via a key for instance.

(2) A lesser issue concerns the fingerprint reader. It does not seem to be recognized/supported directly (fprint-demo does not see it, for instance), and I am wondering whether there is a fix for this somewhere. That one is not a big deal, more a "nice to have". (lsusb comes back with the line "Bus 002 Device 003: ID 138a:0005 DigitalPersona, Inc" for the fingerprint reader.)

Any pointers are greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

jwj

[dawgdoc]

This article titled, How to enable the fingerprint reader with ThinkFinger may be of some assistance.

How to enable the fingerprint reader has a good explanation for using the fingerprint reader with the closed-source binary driver. But there is also an opensource project called ThinkFinger which does the same, but open.

(last modified June 2010)

This article, Get your fingerprint reader to work in Ubuntu, is from 2008 and uses different packages.