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Since updating from 14.04 to 18.04 my trackpad has been repeatedly refusing to work.

I found this solution here which seemed to work but it keeps not working again after random periods of time.

No really sure what to do now since I'm not the most technically minded person.

Anyone got any ideas?

Dpat
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3 Answers3

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I had the exact same issue with Ubuntu 18.04.3 LTS (Bionic Beaver) on Dell Latitude 7400. The approaches described at the link you mentioned did not work for me as well:

  • There was no touchpad found in the output of

     less /proc/bus/input/devices

and

  • switched to synaptics using

     sudo apt install xserver-xorg-input-synaptics

but synaptics was dying randomly and I was forced to reboot every time to get the touchpad working.

What worked for me for to finally switch to the default driver libinput using

sudo apt install libinput-tools

The touchpad is working fine now. If you're looking for the latest version of libinput, follow the answer of @BlandCorporation outlined here.

Summary of @BlandCorporation's answer:

sudo apt install check doxygen libev-dev python3-sphinx
sudo pip3 install recommonmark sphinx_rtd_theme
git clone https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/libinput/libinput
cd libinput
meson --prefix=/usr builddir/
ninja -C builddir/
sudo ninja -C builddir/ install
sudo systemd-hwdb update

Edit:

Even after switching to the default libinput driver the touchpad kept dying at random times. What finally works to get the touchpad working without rebooting is to re-login after suspending (locking the screen and closing the lid).

sherminator35
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0

First try

xinput list

You should get a list of devices for your input. Check if your Touchpad is listed in Pointer section. If it is not, the kernel is not able to detect your hardware.

If it is listing, go on to perform other actions as listed above or mentioned in some of the blogs.

Personally, none of them worked when my Touchpad was frozen. So, I did a complete update and upgrade of system. After doing that, it started working. Maybe, the driver got unmounted while I was working. Hope it helps.

Pranjalya
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0

You're going to see, that there are a lot of fancy and complicated solutions, but I think that the easiest way to solve the problem is

  1. Download from here the bionic (18.04LTS) (oldlibs) kernel and then install it.

  2. Download from here the bionic (18.04LTS) (oldlibs) xorg driver and then install it.

  3. Reboot the system

It should solve the problem. At least it did for me. The solution in the page you refer to are useless, complicated and full of ego. You don't have to be an expert to be an Ubuntu user and to fix the isolated issues.

Hope you to find solution.

PS: Install the synaptics driver for Bionic (18) is not useful, that's why you have to install the driver for Xenial (16), the driver have problems.

Juli
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