A link to this Dell article describes issues with Ubuntu Bionic Beaver and certain Dell Precision / XPS trackpads. I have a Dell Inspiron that is experiencing the same issue. The issue is that Ubuntu 18.04 runs two trackpad drivers at once on these Dell laptops, causing the cursor to jump around the screen.
If I issue the xinput list command I receive the following output:
Virtual core pointer
Virtual core XTEST pointer
Synaptics TM3096-006
SynPS/2 Synaptics Touchpad
To me that says I've got two mouse drivers running; Synaptics TM3096-006 and SynPS/2 Synaptics Touchpad. The article I linked to above describes how to permanently disable the SynPS/2 Synaptics Touchpad driver by editing the *synaptics-quirks.conf and *synaptics.conf files.
My problem is that the *synaptics-quirks.conf and *synaptics.conf files don't even exist in my /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/ directory. The files I have in this directory include:
10-amdgpu.conf
10-quirks.conf
10-radeon.conf
40-libinput.conf
70-wacom.conf
Do I simply create these *synaptics-quirks.conf and *synaptics.conf files in my *xorg.conf.d/ directory? Or edit one (multiple) files already in the directory? The gist of the edit includes adding lines such as:
Section "InputClass"
Identifier "SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad"
MatchProduct "SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad"
MatchIsTouchpad "on"
MatchOS "Linux"
MatchDevicePath "/dev/input/event*"
Option "Ignore" "on"
EndSection
sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-input-synaptics– stackinator Sep 24 '18 at 13:51