Touchpad Settings seem to have disappeared following update to 16.10

Support & Help Requests
1

Hello, community!

The title says it all, really. I used to be able to adjust the touchpad settings via the control center, but now I can only adjust mouse settings for some reason.

Also, my touchpad no longer allows me to move the cursor while a key on my keyboard is depressed. I understand this is a default setting in Ubuntu MATE, but I previously changed it, as I like to play games and don’t always have a real mouse available.

How can I get my settings back? Failing that, is there a text file or something I can use to allow me to move the cursor while holding a key?

2

Hello @Nicholas_Carlton

So from what I understand, your touchpad did worked fine when in 16.04 but after issuing do-release-upgrade it bumped you on 16.10 and from that point on you weren’t able to use it anymore?

If that’s the case, I would suspect a OS corruption during upgrade. What happens if you boot from the 16.10 DVD using LIVE(no need to install) and try your touchpad in MATE, will it work?

Cheers,

3

Hello and thank you for your interest in my problem.

I just tried a live session via USB and can confirm that the touchpad settings do appear in the Control Center.

Does this mean your suspicion of OS corruption is correct? If so, is there any fix other than reinstalling 16.10 from scratch?

4

Can you post the output of these commands?

apt-cache policy xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-input-libinput

ls -l /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/

5

Input:
apt-cache policy xserver-xorg-input-synaptics xserver-xorg-input-libinput

Output:
xserver-xorg-input-synaptics:
Installed: 1.8.3-1ubuntu1
Candidate: 1.8.3-1ubuntu1
Version table:
*** 1.8.3-1ubuntu1 500
500 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu yakkety/main amd64 Packages
100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
xserver-xorg-input-libinput:
Installed: 0.19.0-1
Candidate: 0.19.0-1
Version table:
*** 0.19.0-1 500
500 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu yakkety/universe amd64 Packages
100 /var/lib/dpkg/status

Input:
ls -l /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/

Output:
total 40
-rw-r–r-- 1 root root 92 Sep 16 06:18 10-amdgpu.conf
-rw-r–r-- 1 root root 1099 May 24 18:56 10-evdev.conf
-rw-r–r-- 1 root root 1350 Sep 6 23:50 10-quirks.conf
-rw-r–r-- 1 root root 590 May 24 18:56 11-evdev-quirks.conf
-rw-r–r-- 1 root root 364 May 24 18:56 11-evdev-trackpoint.conf
drwxr-xr-x 1 root root 54 Oct 28 02:42 50-nvidia-drm-outputclass.conf
-rw-r–r-- 1 root root 1751 May 24 19:40 50-synaptics.conf
-rw-r–r-- 1 root root 590 May 24 19:40 51-synaptics-quirks.conf
-rw-r–r-- 1 root root 788 May 10 13:36 60-libinput.conf
-rw-r–r-- 1 root root 2747 May 23 21:57 70-wacom.conf
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 29 Oct 28 02:42 glamoregl.conf -> /etc/alternatives/glamor_conf

6

From my perspective this would indicate OS corruption indeed but most probably monsta is best fit to serve upon fixing this without reinstalling.

Therefore, being a mere mortal, I would consider reinstalling from scratch however I wouldn’t be fully confident that the end result wouldn’t be similar (Read that there would still be problems, possibly different ones).

I think your best bet is following monsta’s suggestions or, if you’re out of time, give reformatting a go but that’s never a real solution.

Cheers,

7

Well, it seems ok to me, synaptics has priority 50 so it should take precedence over libinput which has priority 60. So it should work unless I missed something…

I suggest removing xserver-xorg-input-libinput package then. That is, if nothing depends on it. If you’ll see that some other package(s) would be removed with it, then cancel the removal and post the output here.

8

That solved it, thank you.

So, why, in your more educated opinion, might libinput be conflicting with synaptics, if synaptics theoretically takes precedence?

Just asking as someone who’s trying to learn C programming, and Linux in general.

9

No idea… I think it should take precedence in a fresh installation - to make sure the touchpad settings actually work. (MATE doesn’t have support for libinput yet, I hope to add it in 1.18 release.)
Maybe something else, something I missed, was changed on upgrade.

@Wimpy: maybe you could give some hints on this?