touch pad randomly stopped working on ubuntu desktop

Question

Question: What steps can I take to make a touchpad that once worked, work again.

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Info:

I'm running ubuntu desktop on my net book. it has been working more or less fine. There have been some minor issues. but nothing to bad. recently I was messing around with burning a mandriva .iso, and suddenly my touch pad just stops working. every now and then it will work for a brief moment after I bring back from sleep mode. The computer says that there is a touch pad and that it is active.

any tips?

Solution 1

Ok, it seems that the problem is based in a couple things. While I was doing this I had some sort of serious system failure based on my hard drive. I installed several Operating systems and none would give the ability to use my wireless or Ethernet connections, USB ports, Even my keyboard at some times.

I sought help: Acer Aspire one is falling apart on Ubuntu

After that I still wasn't having any success. my touch pad was still not working. but something must have changed as I, just to humour the manual on ubuntu dedicated to the AspireOne, tried Fn + F7 again. It worked. My touch pad is fine again. lord knows what exactly went wrong, but it works now. shrug

Solution 2

For me the issue was that there was more than one touchpad driver installed on my machine.

ubuntu needs to use the "libinput" driver

lets start by removing all the unneeded drivers. For me the hard part was finding the names of the drivers so that I could use apt to remove them.

using tab completion will help you find your installed drivers.

first: list the drivers that you need to remove. To find the names enter this command to view the contents of the directory that holds the driver configuration files

cd /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/; ls -la;

If you don't see any ".conf" files that have "libinput" in its name; enter the following command to install it:

sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-input-libinput -y;

This will install the file 90-libinput.conf now when you type in ls -la you'll see that file along with others like 10-synaptic.conf and 50-evdev.conf etc...

you want to delete all of the .conf files that aren't being used as well as remove the drivers from the kernel.

To do this you need to know what divers are installed.

All the touchpad drivers for X11 follow this scheme:

xserver-xorg-input-<driver name>

when uninstalling use tab completion to display the drivers to remove:

sudo apt-get remove xserver-xorg-input-<tab x2>

valid driver removal will look something like:

sudo apt-get remove xserver-xorg-input-synaptic

There is likely more than one driver to remove, I had three that where causing me trouble.

once you remove all the unused drivers you need to prep the xorg.conf.d/ files.

Here are some quick commands that will get you up and running:

1) remove all old configuration files: sudo rm -rfi /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/*;

2)remove all old shared configuration files: sudo mv /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/*libinput* $HOME; sudo rm -rfi /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/*; sudo mv $HOME/*libinput* /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/

3) copy new shared configuration file to the other xorg.conf.d folder: sudo cp /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/*libinput* /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/;

4) reboot computer and now the touchpad should work: 'sudo reboot;'

Comments

[Ye Lin Aung]

what's your touchpad brand , something like synaptic ?

[Narcolapser]

yes. and to compound the problem I've reinstall the OS and still have the problem...

[Narcolapser]

Specifics: SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad \n Also this is starting to seem like a hardware issue more than a software issue. It doesn't work even on live OS's.

[monkut]

Similar issue here with ubuntu 20.04. I'm not sure if it's "random" after my pc froze and I did a force system shutdown, when I rebooted the touchpad and trackpoint on my thinkpad stopped working. I've removed the synaptic packages rebooted, and no luck. This helped get mouse working, but I can't seem to get it to work on boot. askubuntu.com/a/1271982/37613