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I have DELL machine with UBUNTU 18.04.3 LTS operating system. I did a routine software update, when prompted by Ubuntu to update itself. And post it, I did a restart. After the restart my touchpad stopped responding.

PLEASE NOTE: i have a dual boot machine, with windows and ubuntu. And on windows touchpad seems to work fine.

I followed this link Touchpad not working on Ubuntu 18.04 . And I tried everything mentioned in that link but nothing seems to help me. My touchpad still remains unresponsive.

Following are output of xinput

enter image description here

As, you can see in the above image it is able to detect Synaptics TM3108-002 (synaptic touchpad) but yet the touchpad is still unresponsive

Also when I do a apt list --installed , I do see xserver-xorg-input-synaptics and xserver-xorg-input-all

Can someone please help me out with making my touchpad responsive again. It is so painful to work on a laptop with unresponsive touchpad.

user2166888
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    Refer https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1854798 (fix [a reversion] is currently in -proposed as I recall, but details on solution can be found there) If you're after a solution as found on this site, you'll have to wait - another user with your actual hardware is https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1855645 – guiverc Dec 10 '19 at 03:10
  • hello @guiverc. your comments helped a lot and my touchpad is back working again. just a question for you. I kind of spend a few hours for looking for how to fix my touchpad but I did not come across the links you shared. did you know from experience where to look? I ask because the links you shared had the exact same hardware, exact same OS, exact same kernel like me and also mentioned the perfect solution but yet after hours of googling I failed to find the links you shared. It was like the links you shared just did not pop up in the google search – user2166888 Dec 12 '19 at 06:47
  • @guiverc so the reason my touchpad stopped working was due to the system update to kernel 4.15.0-72-generic. one solution was to reboot with 4.15.0-70-generic kernel. which i do not know how to do. If possible can you please share how to reboot a machine with a different kernel? – user2166888 Dec 12 '19 at 06:53
  • @guiverc I followed the second solution , sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mapengyu/bionic-oem Question: Since I get it from ppa associated with mapengyu, is it a legit ubuntu kernel. I mean it works fine for now but in future will it get normal ubuntu updates as generally my machine gets? So, suppose the ubuntu software updater wants to update it from 4.15.0-73-generic to 4.15.0-75-generic in future, will it accept the updates and in tun apply the update? – user2166888 Dec 12 '19 at 06:54
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    Comment 11 is followed by comment 13 (the next step after the PPA or personal package archive) where it moves to the official -proposed repository. That would have been my choice, as it's an official source (packages go there before the move to the normal repositories end users use once testing is completed). If your system is production, once the fix as moved from -proposed to normal repositories, you can just disable it, ready to re-enable if you have another issue. – guiverc Dec 12 '19 at 07:20
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    Where I saw it, I can't recall. I may have seen the bug report appear when initially filed by the first user on IRC (#ubuntu-bugs-announce) though it probably only 'stuck' in my mind when I noticed a lot of users have the same issue (similar reports) & I could start changing those to 'duplicates'. I rarely use google; would probably use launchpad itself to search (it's where bug reports are filed for Ubuntu, even Ubuntu spinoffs like Mint occasionally get filed there)... As for booting older kernels, at grub you can select which kernel to boot and it's where I'd select (default = newest) – guiverc Dec 12 '19 at 07:26

3 Answers3

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So, I found the solution here in the links posted above by @guiverc. So system update to kernel 4.15.0-72-generic made the synaptic touchpad unresponsive. So for the time being you can do one of the two things , you can either reboot your system with kernel 4.5.0-70-generic or follow the solution at this link https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1854798/comments/11

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mapengyu/bionic-oem

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt install linux-image-unsigned-4.15.0-73-generic linux-modules-4.15.0-73-generic linux-modules-extra-4.15.0-73-generic

and do a system restart after the above

user2166888
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  • reboot grub with a older kernel - > with https://askubuntu.com/questions/82140/how-can-i-boot-with-an-older-kernel-version – user2166888 Dec 14 '19 at 08:09
  • Edit default boot item in grub menu-> https://askubuntu.com/questions/68547/editing-the-default-boot-item-in-grub-menu-a-definitive-answer – user2166888 Dec 14 '19 at 08:09
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Referring to this comment by cbologa on Synaptics s3203 touchpad not working after update to kernel 4.15.0-72-generic, I reverted back to 4.15.0-70 and it worked.

Eliah Kagan
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Jay Pagnis
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I have the same Dell model and the same thing happened to me. I followed the verified answer from the OP - updated to kernel 4.15.0-73 and the touchpad came back to life

Aqua-
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