Trackpoint of ALPS dual stick/pad device only partially functional

[Robert Persson]

I believe this to be a kernel bug, but I'm not 100% sure. I presume it applies to all flavours of the kernel, and not just to rt. According to ThinkWiki this should have been fixed with 2.6.31 (http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/UltraNav#Linux_Support), but this does not appear to be the case.

For some time I have had the touchpad disabled in BIOS on my Thinkpad R61i with its ALPS dual pointing device. All functions of the trackpoint then worked properly, including middle button scrolling and tap-to-select (although I had to put a line in /etc/rc.local to enable this directly through the relevant file in /sys). Subsequently I did a clean install of Karmic. That is to say, all the settings to do with the trackpoint have been configured automatically by the installer while the touchpad was disabled.

Today I decided to re-enable the touchpad in bios. Suddenly the middle button scrolling and tap-to-select stopped working. All functions of the touchpad (except the ones I don't yet know how to test, such as palm detection), including scrolling, tap-to-select and circular scrolling, can be configured through synclient and other tools, and work fine. It is just those trackpoint functions that are not working.

I have noticed that the device named in /etc/hal/fdi/policy as the middle button scrolling device, "TPPS/2 IBM TrackPoint", is now no longer listed by xinput list --short. What I find instead is

"AlpsPS/2 ALPS DualPoint TouchPad" id=2 [XExtensionPointer]
"DualPoint Stick" id=3 [XExtensionPointer]
which
However when I replace

<match key="info.product" string="TPPS/2 IBM TrackPoint">

with

<match key="info.product" string="DualPoint Stick">

it makes no difference.

I have also noticed that the file tap_to_select, which was present in /sys when I had the touchpad disabled, is no longer there.

What ought to happen is that the full functionality of the trackpoint and touchpad should supported by the kernel and simultaneously available, and they should be easily configurable from a GUI application.

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: amd64
Date: Tue Jan 26 01:17:30 2010
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.10
InstallationMedia: Kubuntu 9.10 "Karmic Koala" - Release amd64 (20091027)
Package: linux-image-rt 2.6.31.9.10
ProcEnviron:
 LANGUAGE=
 PATH=(custom, no user)
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.31-9.152-rt
SourcePackage: linux-meta-rt
Uname: Linux 2.6.31-9-rt x86_64

[Robert Persson (ireneshusband)]

I'm really sorry. Part of this report is invalid. By default middle-button scrolling is assigned to the non-existent button 4. I had reassigned it to 3, when I should have assigned it to 2. Now it works, although I still had to edit the fdi file to make it do so.

On the other hand, tap-to-select still does not work and I don't see any way of enabling it.

[Alessio Igor Bogani (abogani)]

Robert,

Please try this bug against linux-generic kernel first. So check if this bug is already present in launchpad:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bugs?field.searchtext=alps

Thanks!

[Alessio Igor Bogani (abogani)]

Hi,

This bug was reported a while ago and there hasn't been any activity
in it recently. We were wondering if this is still an issue? Can you
try with the latest development release of Ubuntu (Lucid Lynx)? ISO CD
images are available from http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/releases/

Thanks!

[Alessio Igor Bogani (abogani)]

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!