Greetings!
I recently bought a new Acer Aspire 1694WLMI with a Synaptics touchpad and installed Gentoo on it. I have installed the Synaptics driver and configured it properly in xorg.conf. Now I have searched for this problem but was unable to find the exact same symptoms so please forgive if this is a repost.
When the system boots, the touchpad works perfectly with gpm as does my USB mouse. Then when xdm starts both devices still usually work. Because of this I know that not a faulty driver or my configuration is the problem. Then when I login and work for some time (only a few minutes), the touchpad stops working completely. The USB mouse still works fine.
synclient -h only gives me
Code:
Can't detect hardware properties.
This is normal if you are running linux kernel 2.6.
Check the kernel log for touchpad hardware information.
I am indeed running a 2.6.15 kernel. So this is of no help. Further there are no errors, warnings or anything else out of the ordinary in /var/log/messages regarding the touchpad or its driver.
An odd thing I have noticed is this:
When I boot to Windows after the touchpad stopped working, it won't work in Windows either. I thought I had somehow broken it when it occured to me that this laptop has a function key to enable/disable the Synaptics. I pressed it and it worked again. Unfortunately this key does not seem to work under Linux even though I have installed and loaded acerhk.
One last thing that I might mention is that I boot the kernel with the noapic option because otherwise the system crashes on boot due to a buggy BIOS. Also to be able to use acpi I had to give a
hacked DSDT file to the kernel. I am not sure if this would have any effect on the touchpad but it might be worth mentioning.
Does anyone have any hints what I might try? I have been at this for the better part of the evening and I'm running out of ideas...
Thanks
gundelgauk
