Asus X750JA and Ubuntu Gnome 14.04

Question

I just bought an Asus X750JA with windows installed. I decided to use Ubuntu Gnome. The problem is that Ubuntu didn't installed the touchpad drivers. The pad is recognized, but the functions of scrolling, zooming and others are not available. The PC uses Asus Smart Gesture V2.2.19 drivers on Windows, but I don't know which Synaptics driver would work. Thank you in advance for your time

Solution

Asus laptops are shipped with various touchpads. At this moment it look like mostly they are Elantech and Focaltech. Elantech touchpads are fully supported in kernel 3.16. If you installed Ubuntu 14.04.2, it should be already there. Focaltech touchpads are supported from kernel 4.0, which is not in any Ubuntu release yet. It is looking like this is your case.

You can test it by running

dmesg | grep pnp

If you have FLT0101, FLT0102 or FLT0103, you have a supported Focaltech touchpad.

I backported Focaltech driver to Ubuntu kernels 3.16 and 3.19 and made a dkms driver for 3.19. Also I made a PPA with a dkms driver. It works for Ubuntu 15.04 and 14.04.

The driver can be installed by

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:hanipouspilot/focaltech-dkms
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install focaltech-dkms

For Ubuntu 14.04 it will install 3.19 kernel.

If there are no issues with 3.19 kernel, I recomend to remove linux meta packages of older kernels. Otherwise they will update too and report errors, when focaltech-dkms does not build.

These are linux-image-generic-lts-utopic and linux-headers-lts-utopic for 3.16.

linux-image-generic and linux-headers-generic for 3.13.

UPDATE: These touchpads are now supported by the 4.2 kernels. The kernel can be installed by

sudo apt-get install linux-generic-lts-wily

The Focaltech driver from the PPA should be removed.

Comments

[Zatzfara]

Thank you so much! You are awesome. It worked perfectly. If you know how to enable the zoom functions with the touchpad you'd become my hero

[ryanafrish7]

@Pilot6: I have been using Ubuntu 16.04 LTS x64 with kernel 4.4.0-62-generic. The focaltech touchpad is listed as FTE1001:00 0B05:0101. It has been recognized as a mouse.

[Pilot6]

@OutOfRange It is not a Focaltech touchpad. It is an AzureWave.

[ryanafrish7]

@Pilot6 AzureWave seems to be a Wireless LAN manufacturer

[Pilot6]

@OutOfRange That's what Asus told. Anyway yours is not a Focaltech. If you search, you will find how to intsall a driver for your touchpad.