Touchpad moves along with movement between touches

[Fredrik Tolf]

Since I upgraded to the Hardy beta, my touchpad displays very weird behavior. The most prominent and disturbing feature is that whenever I put my finger on it, it moves the cursor a distance proportional to the distance between the absolute point on the physical touchpad where I last had my finger before lifting it from the touchpad, and the new position on the touchpad where I put my finger back down. This makes it impossible to move any large distance, since any effect from dragging the finger from edge to edge is negated.

That is not all, however. The other problem is that various features of the touchpad (including the above described antifeature) seem to turn on and off seemingly randomly (but very seldomly). Suddenly, the above described antifeature can simply vanish, and it may come back later (often much later). Other features affected including drag-touching and virtual mouse wheel scrolling.

It is worth noting that the problem does not manifest itself at all before I've logged in with GDM, or when I start a new X server with no clients, so I'm guessing the problem lies somewhere within Gnome.

[Dereck Wonnacott (dereck)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. It seems that this is an older issue; is it still happening in the latest release 8.04 Hardy? If so, set the bug status to 'new' and leave a comment to signify that it is ready for triage / review. Otherwise if the issue has been fixed, please set the status to 'invalid'.

[Fredrik Tolf (fredrik-dolda2000)]

As I mentioned, it is since I upgraded to the Hardy beta that it started happening -- it was not an issue in Gutsy. If you are referring to whether it still happens since the final release of Hardy, then yes, it does, and it has not vanished since.

I can also provide further evidence that the problem seems to lie somewhere within Gnome, because I was able to hack around the problem by unloading and reloading the psmouse kernel module, so it has to be some user-space program changing some parameter at some point.

However, I reinstalled this laptop with Debian Etch on the 10th of June, so if it has been fixed since then, I will be unable to verify that.

[Jayson Rowe (jayson.rowe)]

We are closing this bug report because it lacks the information we need to investigate the problem, as described in the previous comments. Please reopen it if you can give us the missing information, and don't hesitate to submit bug reports in the future. To reopen the bug report you can click on the current status, under the Status column, and change the Status back to "New". Thanks again!