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

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.

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:

Also, you would run these command in a terminal or console such as rxvt or konsole. To log in to root type
then put in your root password. Some distros, notably Ubuntu, use 'sudo' instead of 'su', so you would use that to run it.

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