Dell Trackpad not recognized in Ubuntu 14.04

Question

Thank you in advance for your assistance.

I recently purchased a new laptop for use with Ubuntu 14.04 (Dell Inspiron i3542-8334BK), and am pleased to report that almost everything works out of the box.

The one exception is the touchpad. Ubuntu does not recognize it as a touchpad, but rather as a mouse. Note that Windows 7 (default installation on my laptop) DOES recognize the touchpad and has full support. Curiously enough, Debian Wheezy also supports my touchpad (running kernel version 3.2).

The largest problems with this are as follows:

1. No scrolling
2. The sensitivity of tap-to-click is outrageous. I normally disable tap-to-click due to general sensitivity problems in Trusty but here I can barely type a sentence without the touchpad accidentally clicking somewhere I don't want it to.

The relevant output from xinput list is:

Virtual core pointer id=2 [master pointer (3)] ⎜ ↳ Virtual core XTEST pointer id=4 [slave pointer (2)] ⎜ ↳ DLL0651:00 06CB:2985 id=11 [slave pointer (2)]

DLL0651:00 06CB:2985 is, of course the touchpad.

Thanks!

UPDATE: The previous Linux Kernel version did not provide support for my touchpad. A kernel update that happened today offered full hardware support.

Solution 1

Installed kernel 3.13 and it worked. I have a dell inspiron 4452. Thanks!

Solution 2

Reinstall the driver:

sudo apt-get --purge autoremove xserver-xorg-input-synaptics && sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-input-synaptics

Then reboot.

Comments

[thatmaheshrs]

hi! i have the exact same touchpad device, but it works erratically. would you be kind enough to let me know what was the kernel version in which you found "full h/w support" for this touchpad?

[davidh048]

It was Linux-Image-Generic 3.13.0-32 and up. Note that this particular trackpad is somewhat lackluster in functionality; sometimes if you accidentally brush against it the cursor will jump to another part of the screen. Adjusting the settings in gpointing-device-settings might help as well.

[thatmaheshrs]

I invested in 5x super-cheap Dell mice. No matter how many I break, I should be good for at least a few months. But, thanks to the mice, and Xubuntu mouse config, I don't need to worry about this touchpad anymore. :)

[davidh048]

That didn't fix the issue; Ubuntu still doesn't recognize my touchpad. If it helps at all, Debian (kernel version 3.2) does support my touchpad. I'm wondering if the hardware support might have been removed in the time between the release of kernel 3.2 and 3.13?

[Pilot6]

Please don't add "thank you" as an answer. Once you have sufficient reputation, you will be able to vote up questions and answers that you found helpful. - From Review

[user.dz]

@Pilot6, May be we should keep this as an answer. The solution was the kernel update, OP wrote it as an edit for its question and didn't post an answer (It's more than 1yr ago).

[Pilot6]

@Sneetsher Is it 3.13 kernel?

[user.dz]

@Pilot6, yeah it's 3.13...

[user.dz]

Citla could you add output of uname -a