I have a Samsung R780 laptop with Synaptics touchpad that's been working fine since I installed 11.10 back in October. Now it's stopped working, this suddenly happened today but I haven't had an update since a couple of days ago so no idea what triggered it. Symptoms are the touchpad works fine at the login screen, but as soon as I login and the desktop appears it stops working. A USB mouse works OK I've tracked it down (I think) to gnome-settings-daemon. I have turned off "disable-while-typing" using
gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.peripherals.touchpad disable-while-typing false
If I run
xinput watch-props "SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad"
in one terminal, and then run
xinput set-prop "SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad" "Device Enabled" 1
in another terminal, the touchpad is enabled for a few seconds, and then something else disables it again, here's the messages from xinput watch-props:
Property 'Device Enabled' changed. Device Enabled (143): 1 Property 'Synaptics Tap Action' changed. Synaptics Tap Action (303): 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0 Property 'Synaptics Edge Scrolling' changed. Synaptics Edge Scrolling (294): 0, 0, 0 Property 'Synaptics Two-Finger Scrolling' changed. Synaptics Two-Finger Scrolling (295): 0, 0 Property 'Synaptics Edge Scrolling' changed. Synaptics Edge Scrolling (294): 0, 0, 0 Property 'Synaptics Two-Finger Scrolling' changed. Synaptics Two-Finger Scrolling (295): 0, 0 Property 'Device Enabled' changed. Device Enabled (143): 0
so something (I believe gnome-daemon-settings) keeps disabling it. If I'm quick I can move the mouse for a couple of seconds after enabling it so I'm sure this is the problem.
Also, if I switch to a virtual terminal (Ctrl+Alt+F1) and back to X again the touchpad is enabled for a couple of seconds before it gets disabled again.
I can't see any settings in gconf-editor that would cause this, also I have no idea why it suddenly started happening. This behaviour happens consistently between reboots now. It's the same whether I run Unity or Gnome shell so not specific to any window manager.
Am I doing something stupid, or should I file a bug report?