The synaptics driver does not have any support for posting absolute motion events, and you get a BadMatch error if you try to pass Absolute to XSetDeviceMode(). I wrote a couple of patches which add this. See http://lists.x.org/archives/xorg-devel/2010-October/013843.html for the introduction to the patch series. The patches themselves are here: http://patchwork.freedesktop.org/patch/2202/ http://patchwork.freedesktop.org/patch/2203/ I also have a pair of patches for the 1.2 branch -- that is what I am actually using -- and it would be nice to get those in as well.
commit a7637b5b3782f6f7b8efadaa459e9e365701d88b commit 0b28a4c046a30ccb83278ea0aa59541fad89092c
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