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Touchpad disable button permanently disables touchpad until reboot

Ubuntu 9.04 AMD64 - Acer Aspire 5536

A togglable button is placed next to my touchpad to temporarily disable it, however once toggled it can't be turned on without rebooting. The backlight behind it still toggles.

The button works perfectly under (*shiver*) Vista.

I've tried the touchfreeeze utility, but it doesn't work for me. Constantly while typing I 'tap' the touchpad, emulating a click and moving my cursor somewhere else. This is a pain :(

Does anyone know how I can configure my system to re-detect the mouse input from the touchpad once it is re-enabled?

-william

Try this to yield more information for us:

Immediately after toggling the touch pad off, give us the output of:

Code:

tail /var/log/messages

Once we can see exactly what is happening when the thing gets toggled off, we can probably tell you what to do to help get it back on.

There is no change to the logs before and after toggling the button, even after toggling it back on.

Code:

Jul 16 20:38:06 AFKveyrdite kernel: [  27.565907] ADDRCONF(NETDEV_UP): wlan0: link is not ready

Jul 16 20:38:50 AFKveyrdite kernel: [  68.793901] ADDRCONF(NETDEV_CHANGE): wlan0: link becomes ready

Jul 16 20:51:28 AFKveyrdite kernel: [  829.571386] totem-plugin-vi[4477]: segfault at 8 ip 0000000000411b00 sp 00007fff369f1020 error 4 in totem-plugin-viewer[400000+35000]

 *Here I plug another mouse in to use before toggling the button*

Jul 16 21:10:52 AFKveyrdite kernel: [ 1993.984086] usb 5-1: new low speed USB device using ohci_hcd and address 2

Jul 16 21:10:52 AFKveyrdite kernel: [ 1994.155010] usb 5-1: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice

Jul 16 21:10:52 AFKveyrdite kernel: [ 1994.222249] usbcore: registered new interface driver hiddev

Jul 16 21:10:52 AFKveyrdite kernel: [ 1994.227012] input: Microsoft Microsoft 3-Button Mouse with IntelliEye(TM) as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:13.0/usb5/5-1/5-1:1.0/input/input10

Jul 16 21:10:52 AFKveyrdite kernel: [ 1994.257191] generic-usb 0003:045E:0040.0001: input,hidraw0: USB HID v1.10 Mouse [Microsoft Microsoft 3-Button Mouse with IntelliEye(TM)] on usb-0000:00:13.0-1/input0

Jul 16 21:10:52 AFKveyrdite kernel: [ 1994.257239] usbcore: registered new interface driver usbhid

Jul 16 21:10:52 AFKveyrdite kernel: [ 1994.257246] usbhid: v2.6:USB HID core driver

 *button toggled off - no change*

 *button toggled on - no change*

EDIT: Kernel 2.6.28-13-generic

Checked Xorg.0.log, syslog and the command lspci, nothing relevant.

Quote:

Originally Posted by William (Dthdealer) (Post 3610276)

Checked Xorg.0.log, syslog and the command lspci, nothing relevant.

Well that is all quite irritating. . . .

How does the thing appear in your dmesg?

The following page should work.

http://www.linuxine.com/2008/06/how-...in-ubuntu.html

I suggest create a custom udev script to set a name for the desire touchpad that matches the vendor ID and product ID.

Quote:

Originally Posted by foodown (Post 3610292)

Well that is all quite irritating. . . .

How does the thing appear in your dmesg?

DMESG logs everything to /var/log/messages, and so the output is the same.

Will try Electro

I've added the whole InputDevice section to xorg.conf, as it did not exist.

Code:

Section "InputDevice"

        Identifier "Synaptics Touchpad"

        Driver "synaptics"

        Option "SendCoreEvents" "true"

        Option "Device" "/dev/psaux"

        Option "Protocol" "auto-dev"

        Option "HorizEdgeScroll" "0"

        Option "SHMConfig" "on" 

EndSection

However upon running either synclient touchpadoff=1 or synclient touchpadoff=0 I'm informed Can't access shared memory area. SHMConfig disabled?
.

*bump*
Any clues?
Will only bump this once (in this topic)

If you get a message stating "Can't access shared memory area. SHMConfig disabled", common sense may tell you it could be a permission problem. If running the utility "synclient" using root or sudo and it still gives you problems, then it could be X11 or something else that is causing the problem.

BTW, do not use colors in post unless you know it will not blend with other colors. Orange is a bad color in this forum. Darker colors are better. Even better plain black works just fine.

Sorry electro - I'm used to forums with only one style where colours contrast.

Thanks - it is a permission problem. I'll try changing the exec permissions of the executable.

EDIT: Seemingly not - even while using superuser/root I still encounter the same problems. X11 problems are a pain to fix, but I'll check the documentation regarding synaptics.

I'm running an Acer Aspire 4810T with Ubuntu Jaunty 9.04 x86_64. I figured out how to get synclient working by doing the following:

Code:

sudo cat >> /etc/hal/fdi/policy/shmconfig.fdi << EOF

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”ISO-8859-1″?>

<deviceinfo version=”0.2″>

<device>

<match key=”input.x11_driver” string=”synaptics”>

<merge key=”input.x11_options.SHMConfig” type=”string”>True</merge>

<merge key=”input.x11_options.HorizEdgeScroll” type=”string”>1</merge>

</match>

</device>

</deviceinfo>

EOF

Knowledge acquired from various sources, and I can't post the URLs thanks to the forum rules!

This allows me to use

Code:

synclient TouchpadOff=0

and

Code:

synclient TouchpadOff=1

to toggle the touchpad from the command line. The next step for me is to see if I can make the touchpad toggle button do that for me.

Any attempt to edit /etc/hal/fdi/policy/shmconfig.fdi gives me a permission denied, even as root. The file does not exist.

Should I boot into recovery mode-->root console and create the file?