Weird touchpad behaviour on ubuntu 16.04

Question

I just bought a lenovo G50 laptop. The laptop came with windows 8.1 and I did my favorite thing, uninstalling windows and installing ubuntu. After it booted first, the touchpad didn't work. When I move my finger on it, the mouse jumps around the screen like crazy, or doesn't move at all, or opens the menu typically should open when pressing the right mouse button.

Then I bought a mouse to check if this is working. To my surprise, the touchpad started working perfectly after I plugged in the mouse.

I've tried to run xinput list to see the input devices. Not much changed from

1. Without mouse

   ⎡ Virtual core pointer id=2 [master pointer (3)]

   ⎜ ↳ Virtual core XTEST pointer id=4 [slave pointer (2)]

   ⎜ ↳ SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad id=12 [slave pointer (2)]

2. With mouse:

   ⎜ Virtual core pointer id=2 [master pointer (3)]

   ⎜ ↳ Virtual core XTEST pointer id=4 [slave pointer (2)]

   ⎜ ↳ SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad id=12 [slave pointer (2)]

   ⎜ ↳ Logitech USB Receiver id=13 [slave pointer (2)]

   ⎜ ↳ Logitech USB Receiver id=14 [slave pointer (2)]

I've seen this thread http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2322413 on ubuntuforums, but the program already is installed on ubuntu 16.04 by default.

Any ways of using the touchpad without a mouse?

Answer 1

So I have a lenovo G50-45 and had suffered the same the exact problem but in my case it still acted weird when connected to a mouse .So here is what i did .I disabled my touchpad and then attached my mouse .To my surprise it was working flawlessly .So I would suggest you to disable your touchpad (System Settings>Mouse and touchpad) .This was the only thing that helped me and made my experience much better .I guess the issue is with synaptic drivers used for the g50 series which do not act accordingly on linux distros.