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RobinUniverse

Member

Registered: 2021-03-14

Posts: 2

Touchpad on newer HP Laptop can only be made to work as PS/2 Generic

Hello

I have a newer HP Laptop (HP Gaming 15-EC0013DX). I got a new install of arch running, pretty standard stuff, basically enough to get plasma up and running, and I noticed that I wasn't able to use my trackpad at all. I at first thought it might have been a problem related to either libinput or synaptic, so I tried both and got nothing to budge, the device shows up (ETPS/2 Elantech Touchpad) in both (libinput list-devices) and (xinput list <devid>), I also tried to cat out /dev/input/event8 and fiddle with the trackpad, but it didn't appear to be sending anything out. It's like the device is there but hasn't been negotiated in the right way to begin communication (just a laymans guess)

I was eventually able to track down a fix that made it work in a very basic way, as a PS/2 generic input from this post here, by adding the launch option (i8042.nopnp=1) and setting the psmouse parameter "proto=imps" ( I eventually figured out that setting it to "proto=bare" seems to work just as well )

This is a workable solution, but when using it like this it ignores any multitouch, so I am unable to scroll, do palm rejection, or ignore inputs while typing, so I would very much appreciate any help in getting this worked out
Thanks

EDIT: Oh, I thought I should mention, I tried running a live boot of manjaro on this machine as well just to see if the problem was outside of the kernel, and the touchpad also did not work in that live environment, so I suspect its something to do with a missing driver (?)

Last edited by RobinUniverse (2021-03-14 20:02:01)

Foxhole

Member

Registered: 2015-08-14

Posts: 37

Re: Touchpad on newer HP Laptop can only be made to work as PS/2 Generic

Sometimes, some laptops have some UEFI touchpad settings (with an old cheap Acer it helped me fixing my touchpad). Have you tried looking/tweaking at them?

RobinUniverse

Member

Registered: 2021-03-14

Posts: 2

Re: Touchpad on newer HP Laptop can only be made to work as PS/2 Generic

Sometimes, some laptops have some UEFI touchpad settings (with an old cheap Acer it helped me fixing my touchpad). Have you tried looking/tweaking at them?

unfortunately no, the options in the uefi menu are extremely basic on this machine