3

I've recently bought Dell inspiron and immediately installed ubuntu on it and pretty quick ran into a problem with the touchpad. Slightest touch moves the pointer away and I start typing somewhere I don't even expect. You can imagine how annoying and frustrating that can be. After some googling I found some settings I can play with, namely xinput and synclient. But thing is those settings seem to not to give any effect. I made a startup script

#!/bin/bash

xinput --set-prop 12 "Synaptics Palm Detection" 1
xinput --set-prop 12 "Synaptics Palm Dimensions" 5 80
xinput --set-prop 12 "Synaptics Locked Drags" 1
xinput --set-prop 12 "Synaptics Locked Drags Timeout" 500
syndaemon -i 1 -K -d

but it doesn't do much. Weird thing, I noticed that "Locked Drags" and "Locked Drags Timeout" options work just fine. But "Palm Detection" and syndaemon one don't work. Hell with the Palm Detection, but syndaemon -i 1 -K -d could solve everything if worked. I also noticed that when I list out input devices via xinput --list I get two touchpads. Maybe something's related to that?

$ xinput --list
⎡ Virtual core pointer                          id=2    [master pointer  (3)]
⎜   ↳ Virtual core XTEST pointer                id=4    [slave  pointer  (2)]
⎜   ↳ ELAN Touchscreen                          id=11   [slave  pointer  (2)]
⎜   ↳ SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad                id=16   [slave  pointer  (2)]
⎜   ↳ DELL0741:00 06CB:7E7E Touchpad            id=12   [slave  pointer  (2)]

Anyways, I'd really appreciate if anyone could point me in right direction.

PS: please let me know if some more info is required on my end.

Thanks.

Kaster
  • 131

2 Answers2

6

I ran in to the same issue after upgrading from 16.04 LTS to 16.10. Reinstalling xserver-xorg-input-all did the trick.

sudo apt install --reinstall xserver-xorg-input-all

My first attempt at reinstalling only xserver-xorg-input-synaptics fixed the issue with the touchpad but broke the keyboard input (on screen keyboard to the rescue).

This was on a Dell XPS 13 9350.

mxdsp
  • 3,988
Tharindu Dissanayake
  • 61
  • 1
  • 1
4

The easiest way is to install libinput. It is a new user space touchpad driver where there is another palm detection algorithm that is more reliable.

Run in terminal

sudo apt install xserver-xorg-input-libinput

and reboot.

You will also need to enable tapping manually in /usr/share/X11/xorg-conf.d/90-libinput.conf.

Pilot6
  • 92,041