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I have a Dell Vostro V13, which Canonical claim is "Certified" for Ubuntu. So it surprises me that the synaptics trackpad isn't recognised as such and defaults to psmouse emulation. This means no multitouch, no gestures, and more importantly, no mousewheel scrolling.

Because it's not loading the synaptic driver, running gpointing-device-settings doesn't help.

I've found this bug which suggests a fix has been committed, but I can't see a way of getting this loaded on my Maverick build. I've tried backports and proposed repos in synaptic, but no joy.

Any ideas?

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Same problem here. Just got a new V13, put in a new Vertex 2 SSD and did a clean Ubuntu 10.10 install. Would love to have support for gestures, or at lest mousewheel scrolling. I did install gpointing-device-settings and configured it to enable mousewheel scrolling, but it didnt do anything. – inder Feb 14 '11 at 4:59
Yep. The most frustrating part of this is that if you install tpconfig, it reports a Synaptics Touchpad running firmware 8.96! But no way of activating it that I can tell. – Scaine Feb 14 '11 at 4:59
Same here, irritating not to be able to use the scroll at least.. Any fix or do we have to wait for 11.04? (don't know if it will fix by then tho) – user10801 Feb 14 '11 at 4:59
Believe me, if I ever find an answer to this, I'll post it as an answer here! Infuriating that this is so broken on "certified" hardware. – Scaine Feb 14 '11 at 9:10

2 Answers

up vote 1 down vote accepted

Sorry for answering my own question, but I've just today (16th Feb 2011) updated my Vostro V13 with Maverick "Proposed" updates, using Synaptic. There was a new kernel which now supports Edge scrolling. Nope, there's no two-finger support (greyed out), but it's a big step in the right direction.

I believe that "Proposed" updates make their way in good time to the mainstream backports or main archives, so sitting tight might be an option here too.

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up vote 1 down vote

Have you tried adding utouch ppa and installing synpatics-dkms from there?

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Nope, and since this is fixed by the latest kernel in 'proposed' (as noted in my own answer), I can't test now. Hopefully this will be useful for others - it sounds like it's worth a try. – Scaine Feb 20 '11 at 8:40

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