I have a Dell Vostro V13, which Canonical claim is "Certified" for Ubuntu. So it surprises me that the synaptics trackpad isn't recognised as such and defaults to psmouse emulation. This means no multitouch, no gestures, and more importantly, no mousewheel scrolling.
Because it's not loading the synaptic driver, running gpointing-device-settings doesn't help.
I've found this bug which suggests a fix has been committed, but I can't see a way of getting this loaded on my Maverick build. I've tried backports and proposed repos in synaptic, but no joy.
Any ideas?
Sorry for answering my own question, but I've just today (16th Feb 2011) updated my Vostro V13 with Maverick "Proposed" updates, using Synaptic. There was a new kernel which now supports Edge scrolling. Nope, there's no two-finger support (greyed out), but it's a big step in the right direction.
I believe that "Proposed" updates make their way in good time to the mainstream backports or main archives, so sitting tight might be an option here too.
Have you tried adding utouch ppa and installing synpatics-dkms from there?