Alps Touchpad functions irratically on Ubuntu 12.04

[Jeff Lane ]

Touchpad behaves wired after fresh installation or live boot from Ubuntu 12.04.
When I tap the touchpad the cursor moves/jumps around. It's hard to hit the right items.

ALPS touchpad is deteced correctly.

When I enter

modprobe -r psmouse
modprobe psmouse proto=imps

the touchpad works correctly, but the vertical scrolling is not possible anymore.

In 11.04 or 11.10 all work out of the box, but the touchpad was not detected as ALPS.

NOTE, I am NOT the original filer. I am converting this from a question on answers.launchpad.net. The original filer is https://launchpad.net/~waltersbox

[walters (waltersbox)]

Anyone?
I tryed every Ubuntu version > 12.04. without success.

[vasek125 (vasek)]

Same problem on my Dell E5530 (ALPS touchpad). Recent 3.5 kernel update added scrolling posibility but after several hours of work cursor "jumps" and no normal movement is possible. "modprobe -r psmouse && modprobe psmouse proto=imps" will disable scrolling but makes touchpad usable. After few minutes I enable scrolling by "modprobe -r psmouse && modprobe psmouse" and then after several minutes the jumping stops (this is very ugly workaround). Same problem with kernel 3.8.

[Gourav (gauchkk)]

Hi Team,

I am facing the same problem in my Dell Vostro 2520, i5,64bit which i bought just 1 month back. sometimes when i use cursor using the touchpad, it jumps around and i am unable to point it out where i want to be. Ubuntu 12.04 is pre-installed in this laptop, due to this problem i removed the existing OS and downloaded fresh Ubuntu Desktop 12.04 and did the clean install. Even-though problem persist.
Please give us some solution.

Thanks and Regards
Gaurav

[Bruce Knapp (bck1)]

I have the same problem with ubuntu 12.04lts on my new Dell Precision M6800 laptop. The best I've been able to do is add
psmous.conf to /etc/modprobe.d with options psmouse proto=imps. This fixes the mouse problems but leaves tapping enabled with no obvious way to disable this annoyance.

[Bruce Knapp (bck1)]

I think I finally stumbled across a solution. I noticed that with the synaptics driver the unstable cursor jumps when it crosses the boundary of a display item and so I disabled desktop effects. I'm now using the synaptics driver happily with no instability and no compiz.