no prefs for touchpad

[Handaa]

Mint 8. On the main menu/preferences/mouse I'm missing the touchpad tag.

[emorrp1 (emorrp1)]

Thank you for reporting a bug in Linux Mint. Unfortunately I do not have the necessary hardware to reproduce your problem. If anyone else can confirm this bug, please say so. Please check out the Linux Mint Forums, where there are many more people available to help out with diagnosing any problems you have. Please repost this in the forums, and put a link to it here, so I can track any further development. It is also exceptionally useful if you include the output of "inxi -F" when reporting hardware problems. You might also like to check out this article: http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/bugs.html This is a standard response, so it may not be entirely appropriate.

Specifically, the issue is two-fold:
1) I know for a fact the touchpad tab does not appear unless Mint has detected a touchpad, so it's possible your touchpad is not being correctly reckognised (see https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SynapticsTouchpad#Troubleshooting), which could be for any number of reasons, so would be a separate bug.
2) There were upstream changes (http://www.lmgtfy.com/?q=karmic+touchpad+preferences - https://bugs.launchpad.net/gnome-control-center/+bug/404638) which may mean the tab has been removed completely, but without the necessary hardware, I can't check this easily, please can you test in Karmic? If the bug is not present in Karmic, then it's a problem with Mint.

[nik.martin (nik-martin)]

I can confirm this bug. I just bought an Avatar Ultrabook ("Mockbook Air"), which is an unheard of, but high quality ultrabook available on NewEgg. It has a new Elan Touchpad, and in Windows 8 supports all sorts of fancy gestures, swiping in from edges, etc. I'm probably one of the first 10 people in the wild running Linux on it.

Anyway, the touchpad is detected as:

Virtual core pointer id=2 [master pointer (3)]
⎜ ↳ Virtual core XTEST pointer id=4 [slave pointer (2)]
⎜ ↳ PS/2 Elantech Touchpad id=11 [slave pointer (2)]

And I have added upstream patches according to:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xserver-xorg-video-intel/+bug/681904/comments/64

But it just acts like a mouse, and there's no UI to control touchpad features. As such, tap2click is on, and extremely sensitive, making the touchpad almost unusable.

I've rebuilt the kernel using latest stable 3.8 from kernel.org, enabled elan touchpad in the config, and still nothing.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for Linux Mint because there has been no activity for 60 days.]