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So I recently installed Ubuntu on my Alienware/Dell and everything was fine until I upgraded to 16.10.

After that out of nowhere my touchpad started acting like a touchscreen (or a graphics tablet) i.e. the pointer jumps to wherever I touch on the pad(like its mapped to the screen.

I tried everything I could find, namely remapping xinput or even removing and adding the mouse module psmouse but nothing worked. I could not find any other solution to this.

Output of xinput

⎡ Virtual core pointer                      id=2    [master pointer  (3)]
⎜   ↳ Virtual core XTEST pointer                id=4    [slave  pointer  (2)]
⎜   ↳ SIGMACHIP Usb Mouse                       id=10   [slave  pointer  (2)]
⎜   ↳ SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad                id=14   [slave  pointer  (2)]
⎣ Virtual core keyboard                     id=3    [master keyboard (2)]
    ↳ Virtual core XTEST keyboard               id=5    [slave  keyboard (3)]
    ↳ Power Button                              id=6    [slave  keyboard (3)]
    ↳ Video Bus                                 id=7    [slave  keyboard (3)]
    ↳ Video Bus                                 id=8    [slave  keyboard (3)]
    ↳ Power Button                              id=9    [slave  keyboard (3)]
    ↳ Integrated_Webcam_HD                      id=11   [slave  keyboard (3)]
    ↳ Intel HID events                          id=12   [slave  keyboard (3)]
    ↳ AT Translated Set 2 keyboard              id=13   [slave  keyboard (3)]
    ↳ Dell WMI hotkeys                          id=15   [slave  keyboard (3)]

↳ SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad is the one that I am talking about.

Output of xinput list-props 14

Device 'SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad':
Device Enabled (165):   1
Coordinate Transformation Matrix (167): 1.000000, 0.000000, 0.000000, 0.000000, 1.000000, 0.000000, 0.000000, 0.000000, 1.000000
Device Accel Profile (295): 0
Device Accel Constant Deceleration (296):   1.000000
Device Accel Adaptive Deceleration (297):   1.000000
Device Accel Velocity Scaling (298):    10.000000
Device Product ID (284):    2, 7
Device Node (285):  "/dev/input/event6"
Evdev Axis Inversion (299): 0, 0
Evdev Axis Calibration (300):   <no items>
Evdev Axes Swap (301):  0
Axis Labels (302):  "Abs MT Position X" (292), "Abs MT Position Y" (293), "Abs MT Pressure" (294), "Abs Tool Width" (291), "None" (0), "None" (0), "None" (0)
Button Labels (303):    "Button Left" (168), "Button Unknown" (287), "Button Right" (170), "Button Wheel Up" (171), "Button Wheel Down" (172)
Evdev Scrolling Distance (304): 0, 0, 0
Evdev Middle Button Emulation (305):    0
Evdev Middle Button Timeout (306):  50
Evdev Third Button Emulation (307): 0
Evdev Third Button Emulation Timeout (308): 1000
Evdev Third Button Emulation Button (309):  3
Evdev Third Button Emulation Threshold (310):   20
Evdev Wheel Emulation (311):    0
Evdev Wheel Emulation Axes (312):   0, 0, 4, 5
Evdev Wheel Emulation Inertia (313):    10
Evdev Wheel Emulation Timeout (314):    200
Evdev Wheel Emulation Button (315): 4
Evdev Drag Lock Buttons (316):  0

I also noticed that people out there get a problem opposite to mine (i.e. their touchscreen acts like a touchpad)

Please suggest what to do.

Pablo Bianchi
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akxer
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2 Answers2

5

There is no user space touchpad driver installed. That is why it is treated like a relative device.

Run

sudo apt install xserver-xorg-input-all

and restart the session.

If you have hwe-16.04 packages installed, you need to run

sudo apt install xserver-xorg-input-all-hwe-16.04
Pilot6
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  • Well, I might sound stupid right about now. That fixed my problem. How did you know that the drivers are missing – akxer Mar 09 '17 at 18:47
  • I see that the device is handled by evdev, not by synaptics or libinput. You can check it now. – Pilot6 Mar 09 '17 at 18:48
  • yea saw that right now. i did try installing libinput but i guess I didn't know enough. Thanks, you made my day – akxer Mar 09 '17 at 18:48
  • That means that none of those were installed. – Pilot6 Mar 09 '17 at 18:49
  • weird, I wonder how that got uninstalled in the update. – akxer Mar 09 '17 at 18:52
  • This kind of things do happen from time to time. A bug in the upgrade path. – Pilot6 Mar 09 '17 at 18:55
  • I got the same bug, with the same solution. In my case, I had previously installed xserver-xorg-hwe-16.04 (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/LTSEnablementStack); installing xserver-xorg-input-all removed the hwe versions and put me back on "normal" packages. Could it be that this upgrade bug only happens to people who tried the HWE package (or otherwise had "odd" xserver packages installed)? – unhammer Mar 11 '17 at 09:24
  • You could install xserver-xorg-input-all-hwe-16.04. – Pilot6 Mar 11 '17 at 10:02
  • Pilot6, I believe that package is gone from yakkety: http://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywords=xserver-xorg-video-all-hwe-16.04 (hence the name 16.04 in the package name?) – unhammer Mar 24 '17 at 09:05
  • @unhammer This package is only for xenial. In yakkety you use xserver-xorg-input-all. – Pilot6 Mar 24 '17 at 09:08
  • The question is about upgrading to 16.10 ;-) – unhammer Mar 24 '17 at 10:30
0

Setting you are looking for is relative- or absolute tracking mode.

This is hardware specific, to find your device, list your devices with the xinput command (without any options). Look for a "slave" device, which is the actual device, not the master device which is virtual.

xinput set-mode ABSOLUTE|RELATIVE will change the mode. Device name can be the Xid number reported by xinput or the actual name, including the quotation marks: xinput set-mode "SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad" RELATIVE. Xinput options: https://www.x.org/archive/current/doc/man/man1/xinput.1.xhtml

If you are using a Wacom pad or tablet simply open the wacom settings window found in ubuntu system settings and click the relevant option. For more on Wacom see help.ubuntu at https://help.ubuntu.com/stable/ubuntu-help/wacom-mode.html

kurja
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