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hg8
Asked: 2015-11-05 02:48:50 +0800 CST

Where should I put my touchpad configuration file?

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I am currently configuring my touchpad and noticed that I can put my Synaptics configuration file (50-synaptics.conf) in two different locations :

/usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/50-synaptics.conf

And

/etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/50-synaptics.conf

Both are working fine. Which one is better to use in this case? Or is this completely irrelevant ?

/etc/ is the nerve center of your system, it contains all system related configuration files in here or in its sub-directories. A "configuration file" is defined as a local file used to control the operation of a program; it must be static and cannot be an executable binary. - TLDP.org

/usr usually contains by far the largest share of data on a system. It contains all the user binaries, their documentation, libraries, header files, etc.... X and its supporting libraries can be found here. In current Unices, /usr is where user-land programs and data (as opposed to 'system land' programs and data) are. Some people may now refer to this directory as meaning 'User System Resources' and not 'user' as was originally intended. - TLDP.org

filesystem

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    The location /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/50-synaptics.conf is used by the package xserver-xorg-input-synaptics.

    If you want to overwrite the configuration, then you could use this configuration file. But it will be removed when you delete the package xserver-xorg-input-synaptics with a purge command.

    And as you can read in /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/50-synaptics.conf

    # DO NOT EDIT THIS FILE, your distribution will likely overwrite
# it when updating. Copy (and rename) this file into
# /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d first.

    Use /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/ and rename the file as noted, but you have to place a number as prefix. By this number the order of processing is affected.

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