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I searched all over the forums and found no thread that spoke directly to this problem except for one. https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=205827 Somehow, I didn't trust the solution of his cat sitting on the keyboard for an hour or so in his terminal, covering his screen in "W"s. :-)
After seeing this problem on 2 different Dell laptops in a row, and E6500 and and E6430, I thought I'd make this post for posterity in case someone comes to the forums looking for a solution to this problem. From reading dozens of posts, it appears there are a lot of touchpad issues for Dell laptops when using the 4.0+ kernel.
Symptom:
Some people complain that the touchpad cursor jumps erratically. But, in fact, there is a pattern to the misbehavior.
When you touch the touchpad, the cursor jumps to the part of the screen relative to where you touch on the touchpad.
For example, if you touch the top right corner of the touchpad the mouse cursor appears at the top right corner of the screen.
If you touch in the middle it would appear in the middle.
No matter where you start touching the touchpad, the cursor stops one inch short of all edges of the screen. Thus you can't access the taskbar, for example.
To be fair, the issue is addressed in the Wiki: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/To … ursor_jump though it leads the reader to believe it was a known bug the developers were working on.
This is what worked for me ... finally!
1) Installed "xf86-input-synaptics" package.
2) I noticed the touchpad was not listed in /dev/input/* (In truth, it still isn't.)
3) Per one of the solutions offered in the wiki, I appended "i8042.nomux=1" to the kernel parameters in "/boot/syslinux/syslinux.cfg". I leave it as an exercise for GRUB users to figure out how to do that for GRUB.
For example, my line in syslinux.cfg now looks like: "APPEND root=/dev/sda1 rw i8042.nomux=1"
3) Rebooted and the problem was fixed.
Hope this helps someone.
(Edit: Added step (1) after trying to get the E6430 working after finding the fix on the E6500 and discovering the problem had not gone away.)
Last edited by whatshisname (2016-08-12 16:48:05)
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