I have an Acer TravelMate 270 with Synaptic Touchpad too.
It used to work fine with Mandrake 9.2 (kernel 2.4) but when I installed Mandrake 10.0, no way to get my touchpad working at all, not eving moving the mouse around, so I am stuck for the time being. I tried all drivers available but nothing change. I am reallly disapointed and looking for a solution.
:(
According to bugzilla, this is a known bug from kernel 2.6. I will try to install kernel 2.4 then...