(Not sure if this should go here or under hardware, but since it is a laptop-specific issue and it's yet-to-be-determined if this is a purely hardware issue, it's going here.)

The other day I got a Toshiba M35X_S149 laptop. I booted it up into Windows the first time just to make sure everything seemed fine, and it did. After that I installed Debian Sarge. When I first installed it I didn't have an internet connection so apparently it didn't grab everything to install. X would load but the touchpad wouldn't work. Finally I had a network connection available, hooked it up, and installed tpconfig. I ran it and it output something like:

ALPS Touchpad ... Detected.

Ok, that was fine. I assumed that some drivers were missing and since I now had an internet connection I reinstalled Debian, as well as tpconfig. That time everything worked just fine under XFree86! (It was running Gnome, only because I didn't have time to install wmaker.)

That is, everything worked fine until yesterday. I don't remember exactly what I was doing (at most I was running some terminals, gvim, gcc, and mpich2), but the cursor just froze. No biggie - I assumed that the parallel C code I was debugging had deadlocked. So I headed over to the console at Ctrl+Alt+F1 to see if there were any jobs I could kill. Hmm...nothing. So headed back to X and found that the cursor was still frozen. So I rebooted the computer and found that the problem hadn't been solved. I ran tpconfig and it responded with the alarming error:

failed:
No Synaptics or ALPS touchpad detected!

(Or something very much like that.) /proc/bus/input/devices shows the following so I suspect that it's at least partially being detected:

I: Bus=0011 Vendor=0002 Product=0001 Version=0000
N: Name="PS/2 Generic Mouse"
P: Phys=isa0060/serio4/input0
H: Handlers=event2 mouse0 ts0
B: EV=7
B: KEY=70000 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
B: REL=3

I tried resetting the touchpad with tpconfig. I've also tried reloading the psmouse module. Looking though stuff on the internet I've found that there are some issues with the touchpads on many recent Toshiba laptops, but these are little glitches. Anyways, I still tried the recommended fix for those ('modprobe psmouse rate=40') in numerous ways/places without success. I've also tried reinstalling Debian a few times - no success!

Finally, I came to the conclusion that it was probably a real hardware problem. But to prove it to Toshiba I'd have to show that it didn't work under Windows. So I found the Toshiba/Windows "recovery" disc and ran it. At first it seemed to work (it deleted the Linux partitions, created an ntfs one, and copied everything there), but it doesn't re-write the master boot record! So when I boot up it runs lilo and has a kernel panic.

I called Toshiba and they were completely unhelpful and unsympathetic. One of the people I talked to required that I give him a lesson of how the computer boots to explain to him what the MBR was. The other was basically "it's your problem, not ours, that our recovery disc doesn't recover the MBR." (They also denied that there were any glitches/issues with the touchpads and keyboards -- even though they're well-documented online!)

Has anyone experienced this type of problem with the Toshiba laptops and the ALPS GlidePad? Or does anyone have some suggestions?

I'm planning on trying to install a different flavor of Linux that has a graphical/X-based installation program, in hopes that it might detect the Glidepad. But in the meantime, any help that people can give me would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks in advance!

--
Kyle

Update:

Given that the two successful installs on this same laptop that are listed on linux-on-laptops and tuxmobil were with Ubuntu and Mandrake, I tried running those installs.:

Ubuntu: no luck. (Given that this is based off of Debian, I figured the results would probably be similar to Debian Sarge.)

Mandrake: Mouse worked just fine in the installation program!! (So apparently it's not a hardware problem!) Got everything installed, it rebooted, and ... the mouse doesn't work! I retried this twice, using both the regular PS/2 and the Synaptics mouse options.

Now I'm even more confused...

--
Kyle

I have the same laptop and touchpad worked at once with both Knoppix and Ubuntu. I am using it now to write this

Hmm! How interesting!
It turns out that it's some device problem on mine. I can cat the mouse devices and play with the touchpad and get nothing printed back. But when I try that in the busybox shell in the mandrake install, as well as the gentoo livecd, it does work! (/dev/input/mice, /dev/input/mouse0 under gentoo - I forgot to write it down under mandrake). But no longer works _after_ I install. So I installed busybox under Debian, went into it during the startup, and then tried to cat the mouse devices there - but alas! - they don't work. Very strange problem.

Could you tell me what mouse device you're using? Also, are you using tpconfig & if so, does that detect the ALPS Glidepad?

just tell me how to get the data you want and I will give that to you.