I have a Lenovo Thinkpad P50 laptop that I just upgraded from Stretch to Buster. After the update my trackpoint no longer works. When Buster boots I see these two error messages:
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i801_smbus 0000:001f.4: Transaction timeout
rmi4_smbus 0-002c: failed to get SMBus version number!
I'm not sure whether they are related but they did not show up in Stretch. Doing `xinput list` returns:
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$ xinput list
⎡ Virtual core pointer id=2 [master pointer (3)]
⎜ ↳ Virtual core XTEST pointer id=4 [slave pointer (2)]
⎜ ↳ Logitech USB Optical Mouse id=9 [slave pointer (2)]
I have found Debian bug report
#880471 that seems to describe identical problem and a workaround for it:
This workaround works for me but of course after a reboot it needs to be repeated. Someone
here suggested rebuilding the kernel and enabling RMI4 (whatever that is, it does coincide with an error message I see when booting), but I'm not keen on building my own kernel. Someone also suggested booting kernel with `psmouse.synaptics_intertouch=1` parameter but that does not work for me.
Is there a way to resolve this problem permanently without having to build my custom kernel?