Touchpad not working Ubuntu 17.10?

Support & Help Requests
1

Hello community.
I have been using Ubuntu MATE since 15.10. Awesome distro btw.

Since some weeks i have been trouble with my touchpad, sometimes the cursor will stop and won’t move until i restart, clicking, right-clicking or double clicking will work as normal though.
I checked with sudo evtest /dev/input/event7 and i can see all the events, even the ones about moving the finger in the touchpad to move the cursor, but the cursor won’t move.
I can’t find anything interesting in dmesg too.

So I would like to know where should i look for to find out the culprit of this?
Thanks.

2

Ubuntu MATE 17.10 is the first version to use the libinput touchpad driver by default instead of the older synaptics driver. Some touchpads still seem to work better with synaptics, so you could try installing it to see if that helps:

sudo apt install xserver-xorg-input-synaptics

and reboot to use it.

4 Likes
3

Thanks @elcste i used to use the lowlatency kernel, now im using the generic one, also i will install the synaptics driver and i hope i won’t see this problem in a while.

EDIT:
I do have xserver-xorg-input-synaptics installed already. I think i installed it while trying to solve it by myself, so i had synaptic driver installed before asking for help here.

4

Thanks @elcste this brought “tap-click” to work again (rest of the touchpad was already working) on my Fuitsu Celsius H710 running Ubuntu 17.10(Unity) and Ubuntu MATE 17.10

5

Glad it works for you! Since I posted that, Martin suggested a better workaround:

6

I’ve installed the old driver because I couldn’t find a solution to my problem - that being that I have to triple click to make directory and file selection in file dialogs. Can anyone direct me where to report the problem or where to find information to diagnose it?

To make tapping work when I installed 17.10 I did this…

Added Option “Tapping” “on” to end of touchpad Section in /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/40-libinput.conf…

Section “InputClass”
Identifier “libinput touchpad catchall”
MatchIsTouchpad “on”
MatchDevicePath “/dev/input/event*”
Driver “libinput”
Option “Tapping” “on” <<<<<<<<<<<<<<< ADDED THIS LINE.
EndSection

7

Thank you very much for this information, in UM 18.04 in my touchpad only left click and pad movement worked and nothing else, after following your instructions everything started working flawlessly!
Two and three finger touch, two finger scrolling and edge scrolling are all working now.