Fix for 'Ubuntu Lucid Touchpad not working'

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.

• unity --replace

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 )

Install IntelliJ IDEA on Linux

Here's a simple way to install IntelliJ IDEA on Ubuntu. I've done this on all Ubuntu Karmic Koala, Lucid Lynx and Maverick Meerkat. This worked just fine on Gentoo Linux too.

1). Install Java (Use Sun JDK. OpenJDK is NOT recommended as the JDK.)
sudo apt-get install sun-java5-jdk
It seems sun-java5-jdk is no longer available now. Refer Oracle Java SE Downloads for Linux and it's installation instructions. Keep the path in your memory; you'll need it when setting up $JDK_HOME path variable.

Then, to make sure that it is installed properly, type
java -version
if the version shows, then it is installed successfully.

2) Now, install IDEA
Download IntelliJ IDEA from the below link
 http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/download/index.html#linux
 Unpack the downloaded archive (ideaIU-9.0.3.tar.gz) by,
     tar xfz ideaIU-9.0.3.tar.gz
(match the file name to your version!)

 Move the extracted archive to /usr/lib
     sudo mv idea-IU-95.429 /usr/lib

3) Configure PATH variables for JDK_HOME and IDEA
     sudo gedit ~/.bashrc
Add following for JDK_HOME to the file, make sure to change the path to reflect your java installation directory.

export JDK_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun

Append the line for PATH variable with this, /usr/lib/idea-IU-95.429/bin . Finally, it should look like this.

export PATH=$PATH:/usr/lib/idea-IU-95.429/bin
Now, run `source ~/.bashrc` to take effect the changes.

4) Run IDEA  by entering following in the terminal
   idea.sh (or sh idea.sh)

NOTE: If you get permission denied error, then you will have to set the correct permissions to idea.sh file by `sudo chmod 755 /usr/lib/idea-IU-95.429/bin/idea.sh` 

For easier execution, create a "Custom Application Launcher" at top panel. Access it via; right-click the top Panel -> "Add  to Panel" -> double click "Custom Application Launcher". Browse and give an icon if you like. Then, use a command similar to,
sh /usr/share/idea-IU-95.66/bin/idea.sh

Custom Application Launcher Properties

If you have any problem in setting up this, drop a comment below. Well, even if you got right, just tell me so. Love to hear that too! :). Good Luck!