Ubuntu Karmic Regression: No Multi-Touch Touchpad Functionality on Asus Eee PC 1000HA

[Dylan Taylor]

On Jaunty, on a default installation, multi-touch functionality worked on my Asus Eee PC 1000HA's Touchpad. Now, on Karmic, the functionality is totally gone. Two finger scrolling, zooming gestures, etc. do not work at all. This feature is rather important to me, since I almost ALWAYS scroll using the two finger gesture instead of the scroll bar, and I see no reason why this functionality would be removed. Granted, I did install Jaunty using the .img file and I installed Karmic using the .iso file (which is ~300MB less, but there was no special .img version of the netbook remix. I would really like to see this fixed in a future patch, hopefully really soon.

[asuastrophysics (grimsrudjk-gmail)]

I can confirm this on an Acer Aspire 4720Z laptop. The touchpad gestures/scrolling worked in Jaunty, but not after the upgrade to Karmic.

I suspect this is a bug with "udev", as it's now replaced "hal" as the hardware detecting service

[David L (davadl)]

Double check under the mouse settings ("System -> Mouse" under UNR and "System -> Preferences -> Mouse" under the normal menu). I found a touchpad settings tab that let me switch between two-finger scrolling and edge scrolling.

[Raphael Mattos (raphael.mattos)]

If you have an ALPS or other touchpad that isn't hardware multitouch capable, there is a problem with a default setting in hal. That's the minimum two finger width, but ALPS touchpads don't detect width. I have an HP dv4 notebook and solved this after creating the 11-x11-synaptics.fdi file in /etc/hal/fdi/policy and adding the "input.x11_options.EmulateTwoFingerMinW" option setting it to zero. The default is 7.

Instructions: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1190259

[juje (badiapablo)]

i don't get any action with my touchpad...not even move the pointer...i guess it's about the upgrade. my hardware it's a eee pc 1000hd and worked ok since hardy.

[Michael Mulqueen (michael.mulqueen)]

I'm also having this problem. I'm using a Thinkpad S12. It's an Alps touchpad and I'm on a fully up to date copy of Karmic. I am attaching a copy of the output of "xinput list".

I tried the hal related fix above, but to no avail.

[Michael Mulqueen (michael.mulqueen)]

lshal suggests that the driver is synaptics for my ALPS touchpad, I presume it will be the same for others. Hopefully if this is attached to a specific package it will get fixed.

[Cecile Braun-Jones (cecile-braun-jones)]

I too am experiencing this bug on a Eee PC 1000HA. Please let me know if there is any information I can provide to help diagnose/solve the problem.

[KyleTilman (kyletilman)]

I can confirm this as well... Same netbook EEE 1000HA. Regardless of settings in system >mouse, synclient reads the same thing. Even with an xorg file in place nothing changes. Not sure if the xorg file is even used anymore considering it wasn't there.
relevant out put of synclient:
    VertEdgeScroll = 1
    HorizEdgeScroll = 0
    CornerCoasting = 0
    VertTwoFingerScroll = 0

This was after i set two finger scrolling in system>mouse.

[Michael Mulqueen (michael.mulqueen)]

This bug may be related. It is not necessarily a duplicate.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xserver-xorg-input-synaptics/+bug/308191

[moparisthebest (moparisthebest)]

I just installed the Karmic netbook-remix on my Asus EEE 1000HA, and indeed scrolling doesn't work at all. 'synclient -l' says that 'VertTwoFingerScroll = 0', but after running the command 'synclient VertTwoFingerScroll=1' scrolling works perfectly. So all that is needed is to make this change permanent to fix this bug.

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

[This was nominated for lucid but it does not appear from the comments that it was tested against lucid. It may well still be an issue, so leaving the bug open for now.]

[spawn57 (spawn57)]

two finger scrolling doesn't work on my Asus 1005PE netbook (bought in Apr 2010 w/Win 7 Starter edition.) Tried on lucid 10.04.1 netbook remix.

[pauljohn32 (pauljohn32)]

I have fought with this and now can tell you the once and for all fix. You can't fix this with GUI menus and such, but this is a definite, lead pipe guaranteed fix if you are willing to do some file editing.

1. As in https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/463735/comments/11, fiddle with synclient to find out what changes you like. (synclient -l to display, synclient VAR=setting to set).

2. Write those settings into the file /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/50-synaptics.conf

For example, here are my settings.
<pre>
Section "InputClass"
        Identifier "touchpad catchall"
        Driver "synaptics"
        MatchIsTouchpad "on"
        MatchDevicePath "/dev/input/event*"
        Option "SHMConfig" "on"
        Option "JumpyCursorThreshold" "150"
        Option "VertEdgeScroll" "1"
        Option "EmulateTwoFingerMinW" "5"
        Option "EmulateTwoFingerMinZ" "40"
        Option "VertTwoFingerScroll" "1"
        Option "HorizTwoFingerScroll" "1"
        Option "VertScrollDelta" "100"
        Option "HorizScrollDelta" "100"
        Option "CircScrollTrigger" "3"
        Option "MinSpeed" "0.3"
        Option "MaxSpeed" "0.6"
EndSection
</pre>

3. Prevent your desktop from changing those settings. XFCE leaves those settings alone, that was how I first figured out they work.

BUT gnome will not leave them alone. Gnome tries to re-set the way it thinks you want, and this work is done by gnome-settings-daemon. It will try to put back in whatever settings youget when you do the menu System/Personal/Mouse to config the touchpad. We need to prevent that from overriding the settings in the synaptics.conf file.

Run "gconf-editor" and navigate to /apps/gnome_settings_daemon/plugins/mouse and UNCHECK active.

Log out, log in. Voila. Long standing problem solved. Whew. I searched for this fix for a months.

If you run KDE, I don't know what you have to do to fix this.

Oh, there is one other change I made, but I think it ends up being irrelevant.

Many people are plagued by this hassle, and they have many descriptions of it. Some think it is a flaw in the Xserver, others see it as a configuration of the startup process, some see it as a mouse configuator problem. Some people noticed that in the X log, it sometimes appears as if the touchpad driver is loaded twice, and people were guessing that was causing the problem that settings in 50-synaptics.conf were ignored. Some people suggested commenting out lines in the file:

/usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/10-evdev.conf

They say do this:

#Section "InputClass"
# Identifier "evdev touchpad catchall"
# MatchIsTouchpad "on"
# MatchDevicePath "/dev/input/event*"
# Driver "evdev"
#EndSection

I did it, and forgot about it. It had no effect as far as I could see. I've been studying the X startup files and I don't see any benefit from this. But it is still that way in my system.

I hope this helps you fix yours :)

PJ

[penalvch (penalvch)]

Dylan Taylor, 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? If so, could you please test for this with the latest development release of Ubuntu? ISO images are available from http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/daily-live/current/ .

If it remains an issue, could you please run the following command in the development release from a Terminal (Applications->Accessories->Terminal), as it will automatically gather and attach updated debug information to this report:

apport-collect -p xserver-xorg-input-synaptics REPLACE-WITH-BUG-NUMBER

Please note, given that the information from the prior release is already available, doing this on a release prior to the development one would not be helpful.

Thank you for your understanding.

Helpful bug reporting tips:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ReportingBugs

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for xserver-xorg-input-synaptics (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]