Finally, a good solution to make Emacs behave reasonably well within my Gnome Desktop with copy & paste operation.
One of these terrible “un-break me” configuration options, where the user is left to wonder why this was broken in the first place…
In my regular reading of Planet Gnome, I stumbled upon the possibility to use more advanced features for most laptop touchpad using the Synaptics driver for XFree86.
The said driver is compatible with my Dell D600 Latitude, but as an ALPS device. To get it to work on my debian set up, I had to:
evdev as a kernel module in Device Drivers/Input device support/Event interface /usr/share/doc/xfree86-driver-synaptics/alps.debian.patch.gz (cd /usr/src ; zcat /usr/share/doc/xfree86-driver-synaptics/alps.debian.patch.gz | patch -p0)