In previous blog entries (disabling the touchpad whilst typing and installing gsynaptics) I described how to enable SHMConfig in order to control the touchpad.
I had some feedback from at least two readers who could not enable SHMConfig, and when they tried to use gsynaptics or syndaemon, they were met with the error “You have to set ‘SHMConfig’ ‘true’ in xorg.conf or XF86Config“. The instructions provided in the post to enable SHMConfig using the /etc/hal/fdi/policy/shmconfig.fdi method did not appear to be working.
After a lot of troubleshooting work with Travis, we were able to determine why this was occuring, and how to resolve it.