Is any driver required for modern touchpads to function correctly?

Question

I was wondering why my touchpad doesn't work well. I can't use it for scrolling up/down/sideways, which I would surely appreciate.

It's the touchpad of a "HP Pavilion G7 notebook (the 1215sd)".

Answer 1

Install the pointing device configuration tool

sudo apt-get install gsynaptic gpointing-device-settings

Go to preferences once installed

GUI tool for setting pointing devices. Currently it can configure mouse type device (mouse, trackpoint etc.) and touchpads.

For mouse you can configure middle button emulation, wheel emulation and scrolling.

It can enable and disable touchpad, or scrolling on it as well as additional parameters like palm detection, locked drags, tapping and scrolling.

If above fails you may use the program Touchpad-Indicator by Lorenzo Carbonell. It's available for Lucid or later. It has a keyboard shortcut to enable/disable the touchpad.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:atareao/atareao
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install touchpad-indicator

source

Answer 2

Probably the easiest way to solve this is to open "Mouse and Touchpad" Settings. Then click the "Touchpad" tab, there will be options there to enable your scrolling.

The vast majority of touchpads are detected out of the box, but the scrolling is often left off by default.

Pick "edge-scrolling" or "2-finger scrolling" depending on your preferences, and then check the box for "Enable Horizontal Scrolling" and that should take care of it.