I have a laptop that I maintain as a template for deployments at a client site. Yesterday, prior to deploying a new laptop, I did the usual routine of apt update --> apt upgrade.
After cloning from the template machine to the new (refurbed) laptop I noticed the trackpoint device was not working. Checking the template laptop revealed that its trackpoint had stopped working, too. After cloning a different, non-updated Xubuntu 16.04 to the laptop -- hey, presto! the trackpoint works again.
Applying the apt update --> apt upgrade to the working image breaks the trackpoint in the same way.
What's broken: the trackpoint shows up as its normal self in the "Mouse and Touchpad" config GUI. Disabling/re-enabling has no effect, as does doing the same in BIOS, in concert with the OS settings
When the trackpoint is enabled, it behaves like a wheel scroll on a normal mouse. e.g. it will scroll a web page up and down, but the mouse pointer will not move. Left and right pressure behave in the same fashion (no pointer movement, the page scrolls left and right)
synaptics touch pad continues to work.
currently at:
/etc/lsb-release
DISTRIB_ID=Ubuntu
DISTRIB_RELEASE=16.04
DISTRIB_CODENAME=xenial
DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="Ubuntu 16.04.2 LTS"
uname -a
Linux xubu-rescue-2 4.4.0-66-generic #87-Ubuntu SMP Fri Mar 3 15:29:05 UTC 2017 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
find /sys/devices/platform/i8042 -name name | xargs grep -i TrackPoint
/sys/devices/platform/i8042/serio1/serio2/input/input8/name:TPPS/2 IBM TrackPoint
Clearly I need to fall back to the working config, but how do I figure out which update (of approx 150, IIRC) is breaking the trackpoint?
Fixing it would also be nice, since it would save about 7 hours of re-work configuring the template machine.
I did find some older stuff about configuring the trackpoint with udev rules, but that appears to be obsoleted by systemd.
thanks in advance for any ideas!
