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I recently installed Ubuntu 18.04 on a Dell Latitude E5470 laptop. It turns out that right from the beginning, the cursor started jumping randomly to the bottom left or to the top right of the screen. When it goes to the top right, when I move the cursor, it goes back to normal, but when it goes to the bottom left even if I insist on getting it out of there, it's still in that position (actually it moves just a little).

I tried disabling the touchpad using Gnome Tweak Tool but it didn't work. Also, it didn't work when I tried to disable the touchpad via a keyboard shortcut. I also realised it's not a pure hardware issue since when I boot in Windows 10 the problem doesn't exist. I also used a wireless mouse with the touchpad disabled but it didn't work either. I doesn't seem to be a problem of interference: it persists even if the laptop is or isn't plugged in. For your information, the laptop also has a touchstick, that I couldn't disable using Tweak Tools.

Any help is much appreciated since it's a very annoying problem and it interferes severely with my usage of the computer.

Thanks in advance!

Alucard
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1 Answers1

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After intensive research, I found the solution! I got it from here. It seems after all the problem had to do with the touchstick. So I had to disable it this way:

1) Type in terminal:

xinput list

All input devices are displayed. In my case, I look for something like "AlpsPS/2 ALPS DualPoint Stick". Then I look at the ID of that particular device (in my case, ID=15).

2) Type in terminal:

xinput -list-props 15

In the output, I see the detailed properties of this particular device. One of the lines should be something like: "Device Enabled (142): 1" (0: disabled, 1: enabled). Then I took note of the ID of that property (142 in this case).

3) Then I disabled it by changing its value to zero:

xinput -set-prop 15 142 0

And that's it, the touchstick is disabled. Also, all of this can be done directly by using:

xinput -set-prop "(name of the device)" "Device Enabled" 0

Hope this helps! Regards!

Alucard
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