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Sometimes after I suspend my Lenovo T520 laptop, the touchpad stops responding. The mouse joystick on the keyboard works, the mouse buttons between the keyboard and the touchpad works, but when I move my finger on the touchpad the mouse cursor does not move.

I am using Ubuntu 12.04, installed fresh a few days ago.

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  • I had to install Synaptiks from the Software Center. I'll try it the next time the problem occurs. Apr 29, 2012 at 17:59
  • Same problem here on a thinkpad W520. After suspend the touchpad SOMETIMES is in scrolling only mode, meaning that no matter if I use one or two fingers, it only controls scrolling not mouse cursor. I have two-finger scrolling enabled, did not test without. Edit: On 12.04 LTS fresh install. Loging out and back in fixes it.
    – user59399
    May 2, 2012 at 1:43
  • Have the same behaviour on a Lenovo X240, after fresh installs of different flavours of 19.10 (xubuntu and ubuntu). Cursor does not move after suspend, xinput shows that "TPPS/2 IBM TrackPoint" has disappeared. Only remedy: reboot.
    – minyves
    Feb 1, 2020 at 20:42

7 Answers 7

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I have a T420 with Ubuntu 12.04.

I tried all the xinput fixes from https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/804109 which used to work with 11.10. With 12 the workaround doesn't work anymore.
What worked is to reload the mouse module, which I guess is simpler than logoff and loggin back.

Try this as root,

modprobe -r psmouse
modprobe psmouse
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  • Yes, thank you! The "red dot" (trackpoint) sometimes doesn't work on my T430u at startup or resuming from standby; this worked great!
    – bmaupin
    Dec 21, 2012 at 5:07
  • Happy happy joy joy! Sep 17, 2019 at 17:12
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This is slightly different from the original poster in that it is not after suspend, but the behaviour is the same.

Lenovo T420, seemingly at random the trackpad will go into scroll-only mode and only the joystick red button thing will work as a mouse. Pressing Fn+F8 once, waiting for the trackpad-disable indicator to show on screen at top left, and pressing Fn+F8 again to enable the trackpad reliably works for me (well, once in a while i've managed to restart the computer doing this, so that's why i say take it slow).

This seems to be an easier work-around than ones i've seen listed, but it's still a pretty annoying bug.

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I sometimes face similar problem. Generally running the Synaptiks application once or twice fixes my problem. You can open the dashboard by pressing the Super key and then search for application and select it using arrow keys and run it by hitting enter.

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  • I have had synaptiks running, but the problem occurred again the next time I suspended. Apr 29, 2012 at 20:03
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I'm having the same problem on a T420, and I found that logging out and back in fixes it. Also, in my case vertical scrolling works, even though I can't move the cursor with the touchpad. I'm still trying to figure out why...

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  • Yes, I also found that a way to fix it is to log out and back in. May 6, 2012 at 17:02
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I had somewhat the same problem. My touchpad is an Alps multitouch ( Acer Aspire 7741G ). Sometimes, either after removing usb mouse or after resuming from suspend (can't figure out exactly which one, but I think one of these 2), my touchpad would stop working. I tried most advices (psmouse, xinput, etc), none worked. Logging out would make the touchpad work, but only for the login screen, after logging in, it would stop again. Reboot did not help either, same as log out.

while contemplating reinstalling ubuntu, I tried logging in with the guest account. The mouse worked after login! So I started wondering if somehow my account settings (kept in the .xxx dirs/files in your home dir - you can see them with "ls -a" command, like ".config") were at fault. So i did a backup of all my hidden dirs/files, and deleted them all (at login, if they are missing, they will be recreated, and you will have the desktop you had after installing).

And it worked! I didn't figure out exactly where the wrong settings were, but I suspect that it is someting like ".config/unity". If you don't want to lose all your settings (browser, transmission, unity, etc), you can try making a backup and deleting sequentially until you find the source, after that restore the ones that had nothing to do with the problem. I had no patience and deleted them all and had to redo all settings (too lazy to copy from backup).

Hope this helps somebody!

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A slightly different solution using modprobe:

sudo rmmod psmouse
sudo modprobe psmouse

source: https://xpapad.wordpress.com/2009/09/09/dealing-with-mouse-and-touchpad-freezes-in-linux/

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As commented above, I had the same behaviour on a Lenovo X240 with Ubuntu 19.10. I had to install the Synaptics TouchPad driver for X.Org server from the repositories

sudo apt install xserver-xorg-input-synaptics

That made it work.

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