Comment 8 for bug 1351305

Revision history for this message
John D Marsden (jdmarsden) wrote :

Summary:

This is fixed in kernel 3.17-rc1.

Detail:

Researching this for my daughter (Ruth Marsden) I've found this issue has been known on the kernel mailing lists for sometime. See http://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-input/msg29123.html.
The issue relates to touchpad devices using the ALPS v7 protocol. These devices are reported in this post to have device info as follows:
         Device ID = 0x73, 0x03, 0x0a
         Firmware ID = 0x88, 0xb*, 0x**
Which includes my daughter's Toshiba Z35 which has this Device ID and Firmware ID = 0x88, 0xb3, 0x22

A kernel patch has been in production over the last few weeks. See http://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-input/msg32703.html and related posts. This patch was added on 9th August and can be found in the Ubuntu kernel daily builds from then and the weekly build at http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v3.17-rc1-utopic/ .
To install this see the "Installing upstream kernels" section of https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/MainlineBuilds .

We've tested the 3.17-rc1 kernel on my daughter's Toshiba Z35 laptop and can confirm that both touchpad and trackpoint devices work. They are recognised as an AlpsPS/2 ALPS DualPoint TouchPad and the touchpad section now appears in System Settings > Mouse & Touchpad. In particular "disabling while typing" is available and works.

Presumably a kernel with this patch will be released in Ubuntu in due course.