Touchpad detected as generic mouse

[mmyers1474]

The system:

Acer Aspire 7551-7422
AMD Phenom II X4 N970

Touchpad has multi-gesture

Default install of Fedora 15 from LiveCD with updates as of June 16th, 2011.

Here is my devices excerpt for the mouse:


I: Bus=0011 Vendor=0002 Product=0005 Version=0000
N: Name="ImPS/2 Generic Wheel Mouse"
P: Phys=isa0060/serio1/input0
S: Sysfs=/devices/platform/i8042/serio1/input/input5
U: Uniq=
H: Handlers=mouse0 event5
B: PROP=0
B: EV=7
B: KEY=70000 0 0 0 0
B: REL=103

When i try to load syndaemon it says no synaptics devices detected. I think my touchpad is alps, wouldn't mind some confirmation. The mouse settings of course offer no touchpad tab as no touchpad driver is loaded. If anyone can give me a tip on this it would be most appreciated.

I'm about to grab everything to recompile the kernel in case it's in there. I appreciate any help in advance. :)

[Mariusz W]

I experience the same problem on Asus U46E laptop with the second generation i5 CPU. The toucjpad is erroneously identified as a mouse.

I installed 64 bit Fedora 16 three days ago. It was a fresh install. I haven't done anything to the default system since installing Fedora.

There is no Touchpad tab in the Gnome "Mouse and Touchpad" System Settings; syndaemon exits with the error message

Unable to find a synaptics device.


The relevant portion of the output of dmidecode:

Handle 0x0046, DMI type 21, 7 bytes
Built-in Pointing Device
Type: Mouse
Interface: PS/2
Buttons: 3


The relevant portion of the output of cat /proc/bus/input/devices
:

I: Bus=0011 Vendor=0002 Product=0001 Version=0063
N: Name="PS/2 Logitech Wheel Mouse"
P: Phys=isa0060/serio4/input0
S: Sysfs=/devices/platform/i8042/serio4/input/input3
U: Uniq=
H: Handlers=mouse0 event3
B: PROP=0
B: EV=7
B: KEY=70000 0 0 0 0
B: REL=103


The relevant portion of the output of dmesg:

[ 2.377728] input: PS/2 Logitech Wheel Mouse as /devices/platform/i8042/serio4/input/input3

I will appreciate suggestions how to deal with this: the situation is unbearable as even the slightest brushing of any part of my hand causes cursor jumps.

Somewhat similar reports , e.g.,

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=123238

indicate this behavior may be due to a bug in the Linux kernel.

---------- Post added at 01:41 AM ---------- Previous post was at 12:38 AM ----------

Searching the Fedora forum thread brought a temporary but what promisses to be a very satisfactory solution:

http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=252908

The tutorial written by deadlycheese shows how to disable/enable at will the touchpad even when the kernel misidentifies it as a mouse. For this, one needs to have the xorg-x11-apps package installed.

The output of xinput list, which lists the input devices, may look like

⎡ Virtual core pointer id=2 [master pointer (3)]
⎜ ↳ Virtual core XTEST pointer id=4 [slave pointer (2)]
⎜ ↳ PIXART USB OPTICAL MOUSE id=10 [slave pointer (2)]
⎜ ↳ PS/2 Logitech Wheel Mouse id=13 [slave pointer (2)]
⎣ Virtual core keyboard id=3 [master keyboard (2)]
↳ Virtual core XTEST keyboard id=5 [slave keyboard (3)]
↳ Power Button id=6 [slave keyboard (3)]
↳ Video Bus id=7 [slave keyboard (3)]
↳ Sleep Button id=8 [slave keyboard (3)]
↳ ASUS USB2.0 WebCam id=9 [slave keyboard (3)]
↳ Asus WMI hotkeys id=11 [slave keyboard (3)]
↳ AT Translated Set 2 keyboard id=12 [slave keyboard (3)]


The entry identified as PS/2 Logitech Wheel Mouse corresponds to the touchpad on my Asus U46E.

To disable the touchpad -- execute the command:

xinput --set-prop "PS/2 Logitech Wheel Mouse" "Device Enabled" 0

To enable it -- execute:

xinput --set-prop "PS/2 Logitech Wheel Mouse" "Device Enabled" 1


You can make the above commands into shell aliases, shell scripts, and keyboard shortcuts and use them in any desktop environment where keyboard shortcuts are definable, e.g., in Fluxbox and Openbox. This is what I am going to do.

---------- Post added at 04:25 AM ---------- Previous post was at 01:41 AM ----------

The first update to the kernel after Fedora 16's release, from 3.1.0-7.fc16.x86_64 to 3.1.1-1.fc16, fixed the problem with misidentified touchpad. Now xinput list shows it as

ETPS/2 Elantech Touchpad

and the Touchpad tab is present in the Mouse and Touchpad Gnome Settings.