Non-functioning touchpad........making me upset!

johnzdrummer · 06-14-2008, 11:29 PM

I have an Acer Aspire 5315 and the touchpad used to work until I shut the computer down one night after working on it. I restarted the computer a couple of days later to fing that the touchpad no longer worked. What do I do to turn it back on or just make it work again.

Would love the help and glad to help in the future if I can.

Thanks.

H_TeXMeX_H · 06-15-2008, 03:10 AM

Welcome to LQ.

Would you mind posting what distro you are using ? Are you sure you didn't change anything before this happened.

As laptop touchpads usually use the psmouse module, and assuming that it is built as a module you can try running this as root to make it work:

Code:

modprobe psmouse
# or if that doesn't work, run
/sbin/modprobe psmouse

Also, you would run these command in a terminal or console such as rxvt or konsole. To log in to root type

Code:

su

then put in your root password. Some distros, notably Ubuntu, use 'sudo' instead of 'su', so you would use that to run it.

storkus · 06-15-2008, 04:53 AM

It's likely nothing to do with the OS: I have an Acer Aspire 5520 and if it's anything like yours, there is a key sequence that turns the pad
on and off. On my computer it is <Fn>+<F7> or look for the key with a finger pointing at a square.

If that doesn't work and you haven't changed anything between then and now (say, a kernel recompile with option changes), I'm not sure what to
say except make sure that "psmouse" is loaded and sees it BEFORE YOU RUN X: X doesn't appear to handle dynamic pointer changes so when switching
from one to another (or from none) you have to restart it. But you didn't mention X so I'm assuming even "dmesg" is empty.

Mike