I did a fresh install of 11.10 shortly after it was released. My laptop's touchpad (a Synaptics touchpad I believe, laptop is an Asus G53SW) had been acting strangely from the beginning. After receiving an answer to this question, I decided to look for other multi-touch gestures, and came across this page in the Ubuntu Wiki. It turns out all of the weird behavior I had observed (windows getting moved, maximized/restored, or grab handles appearing) corresponds to 3-finger gestures. Whenever any of these behaviors occur, my touchpad will generally stop responding to 1-finger movements (tapping for clicks or dragging to move the cursor) until I click one of the two mouse buttons below the pad, which further reinforces my suspicion that the touchpad is somehow sending out 3-finger gestures at random when I use it.
I decided to try all the gestures out myself to see how the touchpad responds. The only gestures I can get to work consistently are: two-finger drag (scrolling) and three-finger tap (grab handles). Three-finger dragging (move window) works fine half the time, the other half the window jumps around a LOT as I drag it. I also ran into this question while researching the subject. I decided to run geistest
to see if my touchpad supported 4 finger gestures in the first place. These were the results: http://pastebin.com/znnnXsA9
So it's clear my touchpad isn't working perfectly. So here's the pertinent questions:
- Is there any way to fix this erratic behavior? I'm guessing no, so...
- Is there any way to disable the 3-finger gestures specifically? According to this question, probably not, so...
- How can I disable multi-touch altogether? How would I re-enable it if I change my mind?
EDIT: Installed Gnome Shell, having no problems with the touchpad. At this point I'm dead sure the problem is with Unity's 3-finger gestures. I'd still like a solution to the issue, as I'm quite partial to Unity.