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I have a less than a year old Acer AspireOne D255E with a fresh install of Ubuntu 11.10. Everything has been working fine. Great OS and great netbook. But today the touchpad stopped working. It had been working fine. I closed the netbook and when I opened it again, a couple of hours later, I could not move the pointer with the touchpad.

I can not get the pointer to move. I cleaned the touchpad surface well, just in case. Everything else is working fine. All the software updates are up-to-date. I have rebooted several times with no solution. I have attached an USB mouse and the pointer works well. What can I do to troubleshoot the problem?

I have gone to the System Settings, touchpad section, and there is not much that I can do there. I would like to determine first if it is a hardware or software issue and then how to resolve it. Is there a way that I can reinstall the touchpad drivers. just in case it is a software problem? I have been using Ubuntu for nearly a year now and am very happy with it. Are there any wise Ubuntu gurus out there who can help me? Thank you for reading this note.

Jorge Castro
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Gustavo
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  • I suggest that your problem is due to an asymmetry in how the scripts run by the pm-utils package when you close/open the lid. Start by listing the files in pm-utils by dpkg -L pm-utils. Read man pm-suspend and /var/log/pm-*. – waltinator Nov 03 '11 at 04:43
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    Have you seen System Settings -> Mouse and Touchpads -> Touchpads -> Disable while typing ?

    I've asked similar question few days back but it was just matter of unticking 'Disable while typing'. Given that you already checked in Settings you probably already looked this option but still in case you overlooked :)

     – wisemonkey Nov 04 '11 at 18:21
  • Have you installed jupiter? – Rens Dec 06 '11 at 15:06
  • possible duplicate of How do I enable my synaptics trackpad? – jrg Jan 10 '12 at 17:41
  • Another data point. For some reason, my software update was interrupted (most likely user error). The trackpad (and wireless for that matter) on my Acer Aspire One (AOD260) stopped working. When running Update Manager, it gave an error ...run dpkg --configure -a.... After doing that and rebooting, trackpad and wireless started working again. –  May 28 '12 at 19:04

5 Answers5

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My daughter complained that the touchpad had stopped working on her Acer Aspire One Happy2 that runs Ubuntu 11.10. It turned out she had accidentally pressed Fn + F7 which disables the touchpad rather than Fn + F8 to mute.

Pressing Fn + F7 brought it back to life.

Evandro Silva
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Mike
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4

It's a problem with IRQ handling between mouse and touchpad. So, run these two commands to restart the driver:

sudo rmmod psmouse
sudo modprobe psmouse

This will make touchpad to work again.

jokerdino
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Arun
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4

This is a way to create a file that fixed my Aspire One, so I'm sharing it:

  1. Open the Terminal
  2. cd /etc/modprobe.d/
  3. gksudo gedit options.conf
  4. In the text editor, type: options psmouse proto=imps
  5. Save the file and close it.
  6. sudo modprobe -r psmouse
  7. sudo modprobe psmouse
jokerdino
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Iran - Brasil
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    There are many suggestions that claim to have resolved this. On my new Acer Aspire One 725 as of today (Sep 8 2012), this is the ONLY one that worked. Many thanks! – gnometorule Sep 08 '12 at 20:43
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It's possible that you used a function key on the keyboard to disable the touchpad.

Michael Martin-Smucker
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xangua
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There is actual a bug in Ubuntu 11.10

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/oneiric/+source/xserver-xorg-input-synaptics/+bug/868400

Steven Peter Beer
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