1

I disabled my Synaptics touchpad while a key on my keyboard and now I can't get it to work again. When I press that key again it says the touchpad turns back on but will not work at all. Rebooting doesn't help, and I tried installing touchpad-indicator but when I try to enable from there it says that it enables, but the icon remains like it's disabled. The odd thing is that it works on the lock screen so I know the drivers aren't messed up, it's just a setting.

Also, the touchpad works on guest mode but still nothing on my account. I tried using gconf to set the touchpad_enable to true and it worked, it sure set it. Doesn't make a difference though, my touchpad is still useless.

Terminal commands I've used:

gconftool-2 --set --type boolean /desktop/gnome/peripherals/touchpad/touchpad_enabled true

synclient Touchpadoff=0  

and:

modprobe psmouse

2 Answers 2

7

I just had this same problem, my solution was: (if you are a newbie memorize it and then do it).

  1. Go to a tty by pressing Ctrl+Alt+F1
  2. Press your Touchpad's enable-disable key: (in my case) Fn+F7
  3. Switch back to X by pressing Ctrl+Alt+F7

(If your Touchpad wasn't re-enabled, press again your Touchpad enable-disable key: Fn+F7)

Before I found this I had tried everything out there but couldn't get it to work until I noticed the button (Fn+F7) used by Ubuntu to enable-disable the Touchpad was the same my laptop's hardware uses, so the issue wasn't that Linux didn't enable the Touchpad, it was that I had two systems (Linux and hardware) enabling and disabling my Touchpad for some reason, they were out of phase, when one enabled, the other disabled. (You can actually make this happen by running my solution again).

enter image description here

1
  • It's super weird that this is required - why does this work? Because X reloads?
    – rtindru
    Sep 3, 2017 at 4:57
1

On 11.10 the laptop touchpad sometimes stopped working after a little while. I resolved it by opening a terminal and using the following command :

synclient Touchpadoff=0

Not sure if it will help or solve your problem, but it's worth trying. :o)

2
  • Thanks, tried this but it didn't work sadly.
    – user71607
    Jun 20, 2012 at 19:58
  • Sorry not to be of more help, hopefully someone will have a solution. Jun 20, 2012 at 20:01

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .