Tag: trackpad

I have received a new Lenovo ThinkPad Carbon X1 (6th generation, mine is the 20KH model with NFC and the higher res screen) which I have been trying to get Kubuntu 18:04 LTS Linux running on. This has been largely successful with a few problematic areas. Mostly the trackpad. I am a fan of mouse pointer emulation, which allows you to do one finger tap for mouse left click, two finger for right click, and three for middle. This is what I haven’t been able to get working really.

The Trackpad

The problems with the trackpad are that it would be slow to start working on boot, and often when waking from sleep. Also mouse button emulation intermittently failed. This would be accompanied with CPU usage spikes that I think were some sort of driver crashing, trace state, or similar.

Edit: This is probably the fix we are looking for! Install xserver-xorg-input-synaptics (which for me is xserver-xorg-input-synaptics-hwe-18.04). The left ‘i2c_i801’ commented out of the ‘/etc/modprobe/blacklist.conf’. This seems to have got it. I now have a trackpad that works on boot and after waking from sleep. I also have the config controls in the settings. So I think this is the way forward. In addition, as the physical buttons did occasionally stop working after reboot, I suggest getting the pm-utils to run the following commands at wake up which I put in a bash script.

#!/bin/bash
#reconnects trackpad after sleep

case "$1" in
    post)
        echo -n "none" | sudo tee /sys/bus/serio/devices/serio1/drvctl
        echo -n "reconnect" | sudo tee /sys/bus/serio/devices/serio1/drvctl
    ;;
esac

The best place for the bash script in Ubuntu 18.04LTS is in a file in /lib/systemd/system-sleep/ which I called trackpad, make sure you make it executable.

Possible fix one: Getting the trackpad working might require that ‘i2c_i801’ is commented out of the ‘/etc/modprobe/blacklist.conf’. This will fix the problems with it being detected on start and coming out of sleep.

However… possible fix two: You might have more success with leaving ‘i2c_i801’ on the blacklist and adding ‘psmouse.synaptics_intertouch=1’ to you grub config (‘/etc/default/grub’) and then running ‘sudo update-grub’. This seems also to work.

So this is the problem with intermittent faults. Getting to the bottom of the problem and the solution is very difficult. So I would suggest you try both and see what works better.

It will not however fix the problems with mouse click emulation intermittently failing. That I have not found a fix and instead switched it off altogether. You are then left with using the mouse buttons.

Sleeping

To get sleeping working correctly you need to make use that in the BIOS the sleep mode is set to Linux instead of windows. That is it. Without that then the system will not come in and out of sleep properly.

Other than these issues, and the WAN modem not working (no driver), the laptop seems to work well.