Debian 9 GNOME touchpad not working

[Chrisdb]

I recently installed Debian 9 stable on a lenovo ideapad 320. After some non free firmware installations almost everthing seems to work, except for the touchpad...

I know gnome 3.20 works with libinput, but for some reason my touchpad does not react at all.

I also tried xserver xorg input synaptic, but as expected it didn't work.

[pylkko]

Can you see any indication of the device in the kernel log?

Is this a new device? If so, you might need a new kernel. I have seen this happen a few times, that is that new laptops come with new fancy touchpads that do not have support in the mainline kernel (even) of their release time. The kernel is 4.9 on Debian and this from 2016.

[Chrisdb]

just had a look, but I don't see anything in the log for the touchpad, just my USB mouse...

How would you advise to upgrade to a newer kernel? I've read it is possible through backports. Is this recommended?

[duffy]

I know it has been a long time, but maybe what I found will help you and others.

I couldn’t get the touchpad on my msi laptop to stop interfering with my typing on the keyboard. I tried looking up on Google “debian disable touchpad”, but couldn’t get any of the suggestions to work.
One suggestions did have the following statement:

Some devices have function keys to enable and disable the touchpad; after the initial transition from the synaptics driver to the libinput driver, those devices may default to disabling the touchpad. Toggling the touchpad enable/disable keyboard key may be required to get the touchpad working again.

On my msi laptop I pressed Fn key with each of the F1 - F12 function keys, trying the touchpad in between each optional key set. I found that on my msi laptop the Fn+F3 combination will toggle the touchpad off/on. On my hpMini 100 netbook, none of the Fn+F1 through F12 would toggle the touchpad.

Following suggestions on this forum, I found a command sequence that will work to enable/disable the touchpad on my msi laptop and my hpMini 100:

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sudo apt-get input xinput

After the installation, enter the following without parameters:

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xinput

You may get a slightly different response than I get on my msi laptop, but note the id of the Touchpad.

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Virtual core pointer                        id=2     [master pointer   (3)]
   -> Virtual core XTEST pointer      id=4     [slave    pointer   (2)] 
   -> YK 2.4G Wireless Device       id=11    [slave    pointer   (2)]
   -> ETPS /2 Elantech Touchpad   id=15    [slave    pointer   (2)]
           {Power Button, Video Bus, etc}

Next, enter the following command with your Touchpad id (id=15, in my case):

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xinput list-props 15

Your response may be slightly different from mine:

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Device "ETPS/2 Elantech Touchpad' :
            Device Enabled (142):    1
            {with a lot of other settings for the touchpad}

To toggle the Touchpad to disable, you need to change the 1 to a 0 (zero). The Device Enable is property 142. You use the following command to disable the touchpad (added the "Usage" information help you):

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Usage: xinput set-int-prop <device> <property> <format (8, 16, 32)> <val> [<val>…]
xinput set-int-prop 15 142 8 0

It is strange, but you have tell the command the "format" of value you want to enter. You do have short integer, long integer, and floating point numbers to enter for some of the settings. After the above command, the touchpad is disabled.

The bad thing about this, is that if you reboot, or re-logon, you have to set disable again. Someone else may be able to tell you how to write a bash script to run on startup set the touchpad to disable.

Debian 9.8 uses libinput driver instead of the Synaptics driver. Now the Keyboard/Mouse menu item doesn't have a tab for the Touchpad. I wish the developers would put it back.

[duffy]

I have found other options to use with the xinput command:

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xinput disable <device>
xinput enable <device>

Where <device> is device number you found from "xinput" command. Now on my msi laptop I have two ways to disable the Touchpad:

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Fn+F3
or
xinput disable 15