Acer V3-372 Touchpad settings with Syndaemon and Synclient

To get the touchpad to the sane settings that I like, I have the following synclient and syndaemons settings:

synclient PalmDetect=1 PalmMinWidth=6 PalmMinZ=1 \
AreaLeftEdge=900 AreaRightEdge=2400 \
FingerLow=1 FingerHigh=5 TapButton1=1 TapButton2=3 \
HorizTwoFingerScroll=1 RightButtonAreaTop=0 RightButtonAreaLeft=0

syndaemon -d -t -K -R -i 2

Note that I make a big left and right section of the pad 'dead' to avoid accidental touches while typing (which I hate) and disable right button tap.

With the more aggresive synclient settings, I'm now also experimenting with disabling syndaemon completely.

Electrical interference and TLP

I installed TLP to see if it could help with battery life, but found that it caused the laptop to reboot when left idle for a few minutes. Rather than try to figure it out, I simply uninstalled TLP.

I also noticed that when touching the touchpad, a high pitched whine can be heard from the speakers. I wonder if the cause can be found and fixed.

Getting Linux (Debian) Running on the Acer V3-372 Skylake Laptop

This post is being written on the Acer V3-372 laptop running Debian, so I have had some degree of success in getting it to work, but it is not perfect.

I'm documenting this as a reminder and to help anyone else who is stuck trying to get this to work.

Legacy BIOS

• I didn't try to install using UEFI, I switched the BIOS to legacy boot.
• You can get into BIOS by pressing F2 on boot
• While you are there, you can change the Touchpad setting to 'Basic'

Installation

• Installation from USB stick worked fine

Graphics crash

• First problem is hanging when switching to graphics mode. To avoid this put in the file /etc/default/grub the line:
• GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="i915.preliminary_hw_support=1 i915.modeset=1 acpi_osi=Linux acpi_backlight=vendor"
• run "update_grub" to apply the settings

Touchpad

• To get this to work, make sure the touchpad is set to "Basic" in the BIOS
• Then also press Fn-F7 to enable the touchpad

Backlight

• This should work if you added the options: "acpi_osi=Linux acpi_backlight=vendor" to the kernel options.

Wifi

• I have not yet managed to get WiFi to work.