Since I’ve bought an ipen, I need different settings for the pen and trackpad. The trackpad should have all the fun little bits that it came with, 2-finger scrolling & a decent speed, while the ipen, to be useful for writing notes in PDFs needs to be soo much slower (a 3/4 ratio of pen-to-screen).  This setup will of course apply to any multiple input device setup..

  1. backup xorg.conf (in terminal: sudo cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf-original)
  2. with the mouse plugged in, lets find which device is which:
    1. sudo cat /dev/input/pxaux   ..now touch the trackpad: see funny letters for each motion? Good. (control-c to exit)
    2. sudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf, add these lines: 
      Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Synaptics Touchpad"
Driver "synaptics"
Option "SendCoreEvents" "true"
Option "Device" "/dev/psaux"
Option "Protocol" "auto"
Option "HorizScrollDelta" "0"
Option "SHMConfig" "on"
EndSection
  3. Now, config the mouse by the same method, but trying /dev/input/mouse0 .. through mouse4.
  4. Add these lines accordingly: 
    Section "InputDevice"
       Identifier "Configured Mouse"
        Driver      "mouse"
        Option      "Protocol" "auto"
        Option      "Device" "/dev/input/mouse4"
        Option      "Emulate3Buttons" "no"
       #Option      "Resolution" "50"
       #Option      "Sensitivity"       "0.24"
       #Option      "ConstantDeceleration" "4"
EndSection
  5. You’ll notice the last 3 lines are commented out.. I used the ‘constant deceleration’ to slow down my 800dpi mouse-pen. I enver played with the other 2, though they might work as well.
  6. Further, I had to add these lines as well for everything to work: 
    Section "ServerFlags"
Option "AutoAddDevices" "0"
Option "DontZap" "off" #ctl-alt-back restart-X
EndSection

Section "ServerLayout"
        Identifier "Default Layout"
        Screen "Default Screen"
        InputDevice "Synaptics Touchpad"
EndSection

When all is said & done, I also found gsynaptics (sudo apt-get install gsynaptics) which allowed fun things like ‘ipod-scrolling’ and corner/edge events.

Final note: I needed my pen to be slower than even xset m 0 0 could give me, though that was close.

2009-10-22 UPDATE: Instead of EVERYTHING above, I finally got this to work in HAL (which means keep the original /etc/X11/xorg.conf file clean), thanks to removing mouseemu which was always making the usb pen-mouse be reconfig’d to normal acceleration! In ubuntu 9.04, I simply created this file: /etc/hal/fdi/policy/10-x11-input.fdi:

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”ISO-8859-1″?>
<deviceinfo version=”0.2″>
<device>
<match key=”info.capabilities” contains=”input.mouse”>
<match key=”info.product” string=”Finger System Inc. i-Pen Mouse FM-100BN”>
<merge key=”input.x11_options.ConstantDeceleration” type=”string”>3</merge>
</match>
</match>
</device>
</deviceinfo>
While debugging, I confirmed the settings were in lshal & /var/log/Xorg.0.log.