Dell XPS 13 touchpad disappears

Support & Help Requests Hardware
,
#1

Hello,

I’m running a new-ish Dell XPS 13 (2015) model and I wanted to say for the most part I love the setup with ubuntu mate 16.04. The main problem that I have is that I will reboot the system a couple times and it will be missing the touchpad settings in the hardware options and the mouse may or not may work at all. I usually have to reboot the system and it will come back.

Is anyone else running the Ubuntu Mate 16.04 on the dell XPS and is willing to share their configuration.

I have set it to not use the default touchpad driver and to use the i2c synaptic driver. Could that be my problem? Anyone have suggestions where I should start?

#2

Hopefully the configuration of my 6 yr old Dell laptop might help you.
Installed touchpad = SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad
I didn’t choose anything special because the touchpad worked exactly as expected with UM 16.04 defaults.

#3

Thanks for that but there are a lot of people who have talked about the default driver not working properly on the Dell XPS 13. I’m guessing that there probably isn’t a lot of people that have the Dell XPS 13 and are running Linux.

I am going to stick with ubuntu mate but I wanted to figure out a way to troubleshoot this issue since I’m not really good at hardware troubleshooting.

1 Like
#4

I had a look here

http://www.googlubuntu.com/results/?cx=006238239194895611142%3Au-ocqbntw_o&cof=FORID%3A9&ie=UTF-8&q=Dell+XPS+13+touchpad&as_qdr=all&sa=Google+Search&lang=en&siteurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.googlubuntu.com%2F

and found

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2316240&p=13461233#post13461233

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2200363&p=12929991#post12929991

Hope it helps

2 Likes
#5

Thanks for the feedback I had done most of that, the problem is that when I turn on i2c_hid blacklist, randomly my mouse will disappear from xinput which is what prompted me to ask this question and when I don’t have that my mouse jumps all over the place but I haven’t tested it long enough to know if the mouse disappearing has stopped.

#6

My solution was to install libinput and that seemed to have solved all of the problems I was experience. This seems to be the new driver that is going to be in Wayland and is still in development (possibly). I no longer have the mouse missing when I boot at random times and the trackpad after some configuration works with natural scrolling and palm detection.

1 Like
#7

Good to hear. I’m considering buy the same machine, and I had read libinput worked better, but I hadn’t actually tried it.

1 Like
#8

Glad I really like the machine overall, I’m now on to the problem where the back-lit keyboard is turning on in Mate even if I have the BIOS setting to off. Also when you turn it off and the screen dims it will power back up to full brightness once you activate the systems again or the screen un-dims. Hopefully I can figure out this issue next and the system will be perfect in my opinion.