Enable touchpad tap to click

[westurner]

Is there a way to enable touchpad tap to click; like you can with gnome-control-center > Mouse and Touchpad?

[quozl]

There was, but it was removed, as we had push-back from teachers with children who couldn't quite get the hang of keeping their fingers off the touchpad at the wrong time, and other teachers who didn't like it when children had laptops that behaved differently.

[westurner]

The clicking of the track pad button(s) seems unnecessary. An entire classroom would be loud.

The optional configuration setting that defaulted to off was removed?

As a developer, there being no way to configure this is a non-starter.

[westurner]

(Re-purposed MacBooks do not have trackpad buttons; though you can make the trackpad click by pressing unnecessarily hard when just tapping is sufficient)

[westurner]

Was this a per-user configuration setting?

[quozl]

Thanks. The optional configuration setting that defaulted to on was removed. It happened when OLPC began using a second source touchpad that supported tap to click, and the customers gave strong feedback when the touchpad reached them. OLPC provided a way for new customers to enable it in their operating system builds. It was a per-system configuration setting; there being no users apart from the default user olpc, and no logon and password prompt.

There was also a configuration setting and GUI for the OLPC XO-1 touchpad, which had both an absolute positioning mode (on the outer two sections), and a relative position mode (on the inner section). Iconography for this is still in the sources.

Sugar inherited this situation, and as far as I know nothing has been done about it since.

As a developer, it doesn't concern me at all, as what Sugar does is already so restrictive in several ways. I'm not the target user.

It would be good to have such configuration settings back again, and I'm in favour, but;

• the target users, elementary school children, don't yet have the awareness and skills to maintain these settings,
• the other target users, elementary school teachers, don't like complex user interfaces with lots of options, or one laptop operating differently from all the others,
• we'd need good translations of the settings, not just Google Translate.

There's also other things we need from the Gnome desktop, like bluetooth device management, and secondary displays.

[quozl]

Actually, given your other comments in #927, sugarlabs/sugar-runner#7 and #929, perhaps you should look at Sugarizer, which is a reimplementation of Sugar using JavaScript and HTML5 which can run inside a web browser. Many of the concerns you have may be solved if you used it instead of Sugar.

[westurner]

While I haven't done anything close to widespread user testing, I suspect that you may be underestimating the capacities of elementary school children to operate standard desktop and workstation machines in various configurations in order to work with browser-based apps like Scratch, ABC Mouse, PBS Kids online, Hour of Code exercises (scratch,) etc.

It's frustrating for a user that manages to handle a boolean configuration setting in other less-restrictive window managers.

I'll take a look at Sugarizer and Sugar-Runner; but TBH SoaS/Fedora+Sugar is frustratingly limiting and the kid can handle gnome just fine. (We didn't need dumbed-down GUIs in my day)

If you need to configure/reset Gnome userspace settings on multiple systems, a configuration management tool like Puppet/Salt/Ansible can help to wrangle those.

This enables touchpad tap-to-click in Gnome:

$ gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.peripherals.touchpad tap-to-click true
$ # gsettings list-recursively

[westurner]

Is this metacity? Is there a command to do this in metacity, as well?

[westurner]

... That could be run in a call to os.system() in Pippy?

[quozl]

While I haven't done anything close to widespread user testing, I suspect that you may be underestimating the capacities of elementary school children to operate standard desktop and workstation machines in various configurations in order to work with browser-based apps like Scratch, ABC Mouse, PBS Kids online, Hour of Code exercises (scratch,) etc.

Our research and experience was in 2006 to 2009, for children on other countries who had no experience with devices, and educational systems where the teacher was the arbiter of device success.

It's frustrating for a user that manages to handle a boolean configuration setting in other less-restrictive window managers.

Sorry about that, but you were not our target. Sugar isn't really a window manager, it's a learning environment.

I'll take a look at Sugarizer and Sugar-Runner; but TBH SoaS/Fedora+Sugar is frustratingly limiting and the kid can handle gnome just fine. (We didn't need dumbed-down GUIs in my day)

Sugar should not be your first choice then. I suggest Android or iOS.

This enables touchpad tap-to-click in Gnome:

$ gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.peripherals.touchpad tap-to-click true
$ # gsettings list-recursively

Yes, I know. Do experiment, i.e. in Terminal. You may also need to run the gnome settings daemon to implement the change to the settings. When I changed media-keys active or xrandr default-monitors-setup settings, they were ineffective unless the settings daemon was run.