Touchpad stopped working on an Acer AspireOne D255E

Question

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.

score 7 · Answer 1 · edited Nov 04 '12 at 16:42

7

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.

edited Nov 04 '12 at 16:42

Evandro Silva

9,922

answered Mar 21 '12 at 18:29

Mike

71

score 4 · Answer 2 · edited May 29 '12 at 04:53

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.

edited May 29 '12 at 04:53

jokerdino

41,732

answered Mar 17 '12 at 11:49

Arun

41

score 4 · Answer 3 · edited Jul 07 '12 at 07:59

4

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

Open the Terminal
cd /etc/modprobe.d/
gksudo gedit options.conf
In the text editor, type: options psmouse proto=imps
Save the file and close it.
sudo modprobe -r psmouse
sudo modprobe psmouse

edited Jul 07 '12 at 07:59

jokerdino

41,732

answered Apr 28 '12 at 15:45

Iran - Brasil

41

score 3 · Answer 4 · edited Feb 13 '12 at 15:21

3

It's possible that you used a function key on the keyboard to disable the touchpad.

edited Feb 13 '12 at 15:21

Michael Martin-Smucker

6,612

answered Feb 12 '12 at 15:54

xangua

7,277

score 2 · Answer 5 · answered Nov 03 '11 at 06:44

2

There is actual a bug in Ubuntu 11.10

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

answered Nov 03 '11 at 06:44

Steven Peter Beer

976

Touchpad stopped working on an Acer AspireOne D255E

5 Answers5

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