touchpad is not detected on vaio laptop

[Wizzu]

I have just upgraded from Intrepid to Jaunty. The touchpad for my Sony Vaio VGN-TX3XP laptop no longer works at all.
Under Intrepid (and before that, on Hardy and Feisty, if I recall correctly) the touchpad was detected properly and I was able to use it without any issues.

The bug 361845 may be same as this bug, but I think it's different because as far as I can tell, my kernel is not even detecting the touchpad (in that bug apparently kernel is detecting the touchpad). Because of this I opened a new bug report.

$ cd /var/lib/acpi-support/; grep '.' *-*
bios-version:R0021N3
system-manufacturer:Sony Corporation
system-product-name:VGN-TX3XP_B
system-version:J001QD5V

$ uname -a
Linux spirit 2.6.28-11-generic #42-Ubuntu SMP Fri Apr 17 01:57:59 UTC 2009 i686 GNU/Linux

also same problem when using this kernel:

$ uname -a
Linux spirit 2.6.27-9-generic #1 SMP Thu Nov 20 21:57:00 UTC 2008 i686 GNU/Linux

I have also installed the linux-restricted-modules package in the hope that it would help, but to no avail.

$ cat /proc/version_signature
Ubuntu 2.6.28-11.42-generic

also this:

$ cat /proc/version_signature
Ubuntu 2.6.27-9.19-generic

Please note that I'm using an external USB mouse, which works fine -- this may be shown in the messages. Under Intrepid, I was able to use both the touchpad and the external mouse together without problems, as well as the touchpad when the USB mouse was not connected.

I have also tried the following, with no success:

1) creating the file /etc/hal/fdi/policy/synaptics.fdi:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<deviceinfo version="0.2">
 <device>
  <match key="input.x11_driver" string="synaptics">
   <merge key="input.x11_options.VertTwoFingerScroll" type="string">true</merge>
   <merge key="input.x11_options.HorizTwoFingerScroll" type="string">true</merge>
  </match>
 </device>
</deviceinfo>

2) creating the file /etc/hal/fdi/policy/shmconfig.fdi:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<deviceinfo version="0.2">
  <device>
    <match key="input.x11_driver" string="synaptics">
      <merge key="input.x11_options.SHMConfig" type="string">True</merge>
    </match>
  </device>
</deviceinfo>

3) Un-commenting the section "Synaptics Touchpad" Input Device section in /etc/X11/xorg.conf, which has a note of "commented out by update-manager, HAL is now used"

[Wizzu (wizzu)]

SOLVED:

I've traced the issue to having "acpi=off" on the kernel command line (had it there due to try to work around some shutdown issues, the machine would not reliably power off). Removing that, and everything works again. But until now, that option did not have any effect...

[Haiko von Holten (hholten)]

everything is alright without acpi=off