Looking for a way to improve synaptic/touchpad palm detection

Question

I find that my touchpad's palm detection is pretty awful. I have set it to the minimum sensitivity not ruining my touchpad use (PalmMinWidth=5, PalmMinZ=1), and I still get random bumps whenever I type on my keyboard.

I'd rather use palm detection than disable keyboard while typing because I find that the keyboard is disabled for too long a period (i.e., I'm done typing and I have to wait 2 seconds before using the keyboard again, which is annoying). A possible strategy would be to reduce this delay, although I'm not sure if the touchpad would stay usable (if you know how to do this, post it, better than nothing :).

Whenever I use windows, I find I'm not having so much trouble with the touchpad, so there must be a way to improve palm detection?

Lastly, I'm running Debian testing 64 bits on linux kernel 3.2.0-rc7.

Answer 1

I found the way to modify the length of time during which the touchpad is disabled while typing. For anyone else out there looking for it here it is :

Note: a google search yields the answer quickly enough

Just run the program syndaemon -d and add as an option -i wait_time where wait_time is the length of time to wait before re-enabling the touchpad. Other useful parameters to give syndaemon include -K to never disable the touchpad when the keystrokes are of the format modifier+key and -t to only disable clicks and not mouse movements.

So, in my case, I added the following to a script I run on login:

#Get rid of previous syndaemon
killall syndaemon
#More aggressive behavior, allow for mod+key combos, enable mouse movements
syndaemon -i 0.2 -K -t -d

With all these modifications, especially the -t flag, I can live with the touchpad as it is for now!