ImPS/2 ALPS GlidePoint (touchpad) incorrectly detected as PS/2 mouse on Dell E5420

[Otto Kekäläinen]

On Dell E5420 in Ubuntu 11.04 the touchpad is detected by the kernel as a regular mouse, thus advanced touchpad features are not working.

Pointing and scrolling works, but not the other touchpad features, like ability to deactive while typing, ability deactivate when pressing Fn+F5 or dual point feature. Especially annoying since that my palm hits the touchpad all the time when I'm writing.

I just bought this Dell E5420 (http://www.ubuntu.com/certification/hardware/201011-6891) that is marketed in Finland as Ubuntu certified although Dell Finland was unable to ship it pre-installed and I got to install Ubuntu 11.04 myself. I will also notify Dell Finland about this bug.

Debug info:
- Pressing Fn+F5 correctly flashes the touchpad icon on/off, but it has no real effect.
- Changing /desktop/gnome/peripherals/mouse/touchpad_enabled in gconf has no effect.
- xinput list shows touchpad detected as "ImPS/2 ALPS GlidePoint"
- $ xinput list-props "ImPS/2 ALPS GlidePoint" shows:
Device 'ImPS/2 ALPS GlidePoint':
 Device Enabled (127): 0
 Coordinate Transformation Matrix (129): 1.000000, 0.000000, 0.000000, 0.000000, 1.000000, 0.000000, 0.000000, 0.000000, 1.000000
 Device Accel Profile (247): 0
 Device Accel Constant Deceleration (248): 1.000000
 Device Accel Adaptive Deceleration (249): 1.000000
 Device Accel Velocity Scaling (250): 10.000000
 Evdev Axis Inversion (251): 0, 0
 Evdev Axes Swap (253): 0
 Axis Labels (254): "Rel X" (137), "Rel Y" (138)
 Button Labels (255): "Button Left" (130), "Button Middle" (131), "Button Right" (132), "Button Wheel Up" (133), "Button Wheel Down" (134), "Button Horiz Wheel Left" (135), "Button Horiz Wheel Right" (136)
 Evdev Middle Button Emulation (256): 0
 Evdev Middle Button Timeout (257): 50
 Evdev Wheel Emulation (258): 0
 Evdev Wheel Emulation Axes (259): 0, 0, 4, 5
 Evdev Wheel Emulation Inertia (260): 10
 Evdev Wheel Emulation Timeout (261): 200
 Evdev Wheel Emulation Button (262): 4
 Evdev Drag Lock Buttons (263): 0

-> conclusion: mouse detected as normal mouse, not touchpad

In dmesg in can find:
[ 12.559359] alps.c: Enabled hardware quirk, falling back to psmouse-core
[ 12.572794] input: ImPS/2 ALPS GlidePoint as /devices/platform/i8042/serio1/input/input9

Kernel:
Linux Latitude-E5420 2.6.38-8-generic #42-Ubuntu SMP Mon Apr 11 03:31:24 UTC 2011 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
Ubuntu 2.6.38-8.42-generic 2.6.38.2

Xorg does not anything about touchpad:
$ cat /var/log/Xorg.0.log | grep -i synaptics
$ cat /var/log/Xorg.0.log | grep -i touch
$ cat /var/log/Xorg.0.log | grep -i pad

The computer is only usable with external mouse and touchpad completely disabled with
xinput set-prop 13 "Device Enabled" 0

Possible related bug: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/565543

[TomasHermosilla (thermosilla)]

Same bug on Dell Latitude E6410

[Otto Kekäläinen (otto)]

Dell customer support gave me the URL http://support.euro.dell.com/support/downloads/driverslist.aspx?os=WN104&catid=-1&dateid=-1&impid=-1&osl=FR&typeid=-1&formatid=-1&servicetag=&SystemID=LAT_E5420&hidos=NAA&hidlang=FR&TabIndex=&scanSupported=False&scanConsent=False from where I downloaded the Touchpad driver package and from there installed alps-driver-psmouse-maverick-dkms_2.6.35.22_all.deb.

There is no documenation so I really don't even know what the driver is supposed to do and why it has the name "psmouse" in it. After installation

$ dkms status
virtualbox-ose, 4.0.4, 2.6.38-8-generic, x86_64: installed
alps-driver-psmouse-maverick, 2.6.35.22: added

I don't even know if the 2.6.35 series driver is applied to the Natty 2.6.38 kernel, at least the output of "xinput list-props 13" still show the same properties as a PS/2 mouse instead of a touchpad.

[jason verrastro (jasonverrastro)]

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?pid=1169227

[jason verrastro (jasonverrastro)]

this fixed it for me and you dont have to touch the alps.c the 1.3 has the most up to date alps.c