Ubuntu 10.04 is intended as a Long Term Support (LTS) release, but surely it's not less of bugs. Touchpad stopped working when disable button is pressed, is surely one major bug of Lucid by usability wise. My friend Subash and I both faced this problem when we install Lucid. We both have HP Pavillion Series Laptops. In theory, this should work on any laptop/touchpad. Based on user comments, this fix was successful in both Acer and Lenovo, (and of course HP). Does this applies to later versions of Ubuntu as well? Just let me know. I'm using Gentoo Linux now for a change!
There's a fix for
Ubuntu 11.04, 11.10 (Unity) as well. Read to the end.
The Synaptic Touchpad driver of touch-pad is installed, and it's Recognized. The problem is sometimes it gets disabled for no reason. Subash's Touchpad didn't work just after the fresh install, forcing him to reinstall again, as the reason was unclear at the moment. Later we found the problem and the fix.
What we have to do is enable the touchpad by setting the
touchpad_enabled property
to true. Here's the command to do it in one step.
gconftool --type Boolean --set /desktop/gnome/peripherals/touchpad/touchpad_enabled true
This changes the
touchpad_enabled property to
true in
~/.gconf/desktop/gnome/peripherals/touchpad/%gconf.xml file. This will fix the issue.
Alternative to above, you may edit the file manually and restart gnome. Change the
touchpad_enabled property to
true (see screenshot), and enter following command in terminal:
killall gnome-session
As I've said, this has fixed the issue in my laptop, HP DV-5, Synaptic Touchpad, Ubuntu 10.04. Share the model of your laptop as well if this fix worked for you too.
The above solution is for GNOME, and probably won't work on
Unity Desktop Environment (ie.
Ubuntu 11.04, 11.10). For that, try the following.
Wait for few minutes until it loads all back in to place. If this didn't work, try the following command. My issue was solved by the following command on Ubuntu
11.10. But I tried the above one first.
sudo modprobe -r psmouse && sudo modprobe psmouse
Does this fix work for you? I haven't extensively checked this. So, value your feedback.
UPDATE 1: After the touchpad issue, it's quite difficult to navigate. So, I created a simple
script for it. Save it to your home(~/) folder. Then, you can run it by following command from terminal.
sh ~/touchpad-fix.sh
Download
touchpad-fix.sh
(You can get the terminal by pressing ALT+F2. Type "
gnome-terminal" without quotes and press Enter. Or just press
Ctrl + Alt + T)
UPDATE 2: Sometimes, when touchpad disable button is pressed, Keyboard starts to not work. But, still (fortunately) some key combinations works. The reason for keyboard not functioning is unknown for me, but there's a workaround for this problem. The work around which fixed this keyboard issue is the following.
That is, go to console tty1 and come back! Strange, but it does work.
- Press CTRL+ALT+F1 (This will bring you out of X Window for a moment)
- Then, CTRL+ALT+F7 (This brings back the X )