Trackpad | Touchpad

If you've keeping up with the HP Mini 311 Darwin Project progression (or perhaps we shouldn't call the effort to maintain Snow Leopard running on the HP Mini 311 netbook because the project, is indeed and irrevocably, closed by the author), you'd be well aware that the disgruntling Alps GlidePoint trackpad is seen as PS2 mouse by OS X Snow Leopard. Though that hardly discredits the aforementioned hardware of the HP Mini 311's being what it is - that is, verging on the lines of a "disgrace" to its fellow netbooks it's no better than a PS2 mouse - it's a fact we hackers do not like.

But thanks to a forumer named "alabamas", OS X now sees, (yes, you're right) the non-multitouch Alps GlidePoint trackpad, as, well, a trackpad. Check out the new prefPane:

The driver is in testing stage so the controls are still not quite there yet - I could very well tap to click even when the checkbox for the feature remained inactivated. Also, scrolling which was magically enabled by default when the trackpad was still a PS2 mouse, is now missing in action. I thought I'd never miss edge scrolling but obviously I did. And much to my surprise at that.

Give the kext a try - you can get it from the forum thread here.

Mount your EFI partition first (Terminal, sudo):

$ mkdir /Volumes/EFI 

$ mount_hfs /dev/disk0s1 /Volumes/EFI

Then drop the ApplePS2Trackpad.kext inside /Volumes/EFI/Extra/Extensions folder, go back to Terminal again to set permissions on the partition and rebuild the kext cache:

$ chmod -R 755 /Volumes/EFI/Extra/Extensions

$ chown -R root:wheel /Volumes/EFI/Extensions

$ rm -rf /Volumes/EFI/Extra/Extensions.mkext

$ kextcache -a i386 -K /mach_kernel -m /Volumes/EFI/Extra/Extensions.mkext /Volumes/EFI/Extra/Extensions

Verify that a new Extensions.mkext file has indeed been created inside /Volumes/EFI/Extra/ folder.

$ umount -f /dev/disk0s1

$ rm -rf /Volumes/EFI

Restart your machine.

Note: I actually booted with -v and -f flags as I normally did (thinking it a good hackintosher practice each and everytime a new kext is installed - a clean new slate, if you will) but that ended up with the trackpad not working when I got into my Desktop. So I restarted once more and this time, I let my usual non verbose mode go and trackpad worked.

Actually, I personally think an external mouse has more features therefore, is more useful. Poor Alps GlidePoint!