Touchpad stops working shortly after booting

[Conan]

I cannot get any distribution of Ubuntu to play with the touchpad on Asus UX501VW (dual boot with pre-installed windows, fast boot switched off in UEFI Bios). The touchpad freezes almost immediately when booting Ubuntu 14.04, 15.10 and 16.04 from disk. After install, the problem remains.

I have tested Kernels 3.2.0, 3.3.0, 3.3.5, 3.4.0, 3.5.0 and 3.5.2 and the problem remains in all cases.

I have tried setting TouchpadOff=0 in synclient options to no avail. I have tried playing with gnome settings with no luck.

The current set-up I'm reporting from is Ubuntu 14.04, 4.3.5-040305-generic. I'm installing on ASUS UX501VW with an Elantech touchpad.

In dmesg I find the following lines which may be relevant:

[ 1.740717] i2c_designware i2c_designware.1: i2c_dw_handle_tx_abort: lost arbitration
[ 1.740718] i2c_hid i2c-ELAN1000:00: hid_descr_cmd failed
[ 1.752270] [drm:intel_dp_aux_ch [i915]] *ERROR* dp aux hw did not signal timeout (has irq: 1)!
[ 1.756082] i2c-ELAN1000:00 supply vcc not found, using dummy regulator
[ 1.756310] i2c_designware i2c_designware.1: i2c_dw_handle_tx_abort: lost arbitration
[ 1.756312] elan_i2c i2c-ELAN1000:00: writing cmd (0x0005) failed: -11
[ 1.756313] elan_i2c i2c-ELAN1000:00: device reset failed: -11
[ 1.756313] elan_i2c i2c-ELAN1000:00: device initialize failed: -11