Trackpad stops working until reboot (Asus EeePc 900)

Question

I'm running Ubuntu (natty) on my Asus EeePc 900, and recently an interesting problem has appeared: the trackpad and its buttons sometimes stop working, and stay nonfunctional until I reboot the computer.

I can't find anything relevant in dmesg, and I'm not really sure where else to look for clues to the problem. What can I do to make the trackpad stop doing this? Or failing that, is there some way to "restart" the trackpad without rebooting the entire computer?

Answer 1

I don't know if you helped the original poster, but you sure helped me.

In case someone else stumbles upon this thread, the module they want to reload is psmouse (at least that was the case for me, running mint 12 lisa with kde).

sudo modprobe -r psmouse

and then

sudo modprobe -a psmouse

Answer 2

trying running this is terminal when it stops work. synclient TouchpadOff=0

Answer 3

You can try to restart the module that's responsible for it. I don't have a touchpad so I can't tell you what it'll be but you can find out which modules are loaded using:

lsmod

from this output, if you can identify the module (maybe if you post the list here someone else can take a more educated guess,) and you can remove the module:

sudo modprobe -r [module name]

check your dmesg, or just leave your computer a few seconds to allow the module to unload and, essentially, drop the hardware, and then re-add it:

sudo modprobe -a [module name]

However, something intermittent like this sounds more hardware related.