Read this conversation about the problem.

Thanks KFNMPAH. Ive gone and looked at that patch. 

I noticed its a patch for src/synaptics.c which I only find in the installation folder "xf86-input-synaptics" I had previously downloaded.

Just to confirm, we are not patching an already installed file but we are supposed to patch the pre-installation file and then run ./config, make, make install again. Is that correct?

Yes, but the upstream driver has "autogen.sh" instead of "configure", but some distro may include a "configure" script.

Here you can find some detailed instructions for Debian.

Ok, thanks! I actually was just on that page you recommend with instructions and am now in the process of getting my kernel up to date. 

Thanks again!

Ive finally had time to get back to this. Ive gone an updated the driver according to that link. 

I must say that even though I had originally fixed the palm detection this fix seems even better after editing /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-synaptics.conf.

However, even after using the cursor jump patch Im still getting quite a bit of cursor jumping. Do you know if any of the settings in the 20-synaptics.conf file affect the cursor jump issue?

I did upgrade to the my kernel to 3.16.1.

Thanks!

The patch for the cursor jumps is not really smart and simply ignores big movements.

If the jumps are due to what is described in the mailing list, one thing you can do is to impose stricter constraints. You can do that modifying in src/synaptics.c the following line:

    if (para->clickpad && abs(dx) > priv->maxx/4 && abs(dy) > priv->maxy/4)
        ignore_motion = TRUE;

to something like

    if (para->clickpad && abs(dx) > priv->maxx/X && abs(dy) > priv->maxy/Y)
        ignore_motion = TRUE;

where X and Y are two numbers. If X is 4, than movements are ignored when the finger is moved for more than 1/4 of the width in less than roughly 20ms. Same for Y.