X11 Touchpad and Keyboard Issues on Lenovo Ideapad 3 17" core i5

RMLangham · 2022-02-11 18:48:30

I would consider myself an intermediate user, but the hardware and /sys side of Linux is something I tend to shy away from, so this problem has me stumped. I don't know what information to include here, so if I've left something out, just ask and I will gladly provide the output of any utility you care to mention!

I have the Lenovo Ideapad 3 17" with the Intel Core i5 and Intel Iris graphics. I installed Arch on it manually on an aftermarket SSD. I couldn't get UEFI boot to work right because of Lenovo's custom firmware, so it boots to GRUB in legacy mode. Maybe there was some obvious way to fix that that I missed, but it works well enough for me.

It has never had a desktop environment installed on it. I have used several different window managers -- most prolifically i3-gaps but also FLWM and CWM.

Instead of a display manager, I have a script in profile.d starts xinit when I log in at the console. Usually I have conky, i3-bar, xbindkeys and twnd-daemon running in the background, and probably something I've forgotten.

But, at one point, I wanted to switch to LightDM for some reason. I installed it, found out I hated it even more than I had when I used it on Fedora years ago, and uninstalled it and restored my startup script. About then was when my troubles started.

Sometimes the touchpad just freezes up. (I will mention that, to get touchpad to work with Linux at all on this computer, I had to add "pci=nocrs" to the kernel line.) This scared me, as I've accidentally gotten moisture on my computer before. But when I use ctrl+alt+fn keys to change to a different TTY and back, the cursor is always immediately unfrozen, and the same for when I restart the X server.

Sometimes it seems like caps-lock has come on. I will say that I have disabled caps lock and mapped that key to be "compose" as per the instructions in the Arch Wiki. This forces me to restart the server as it prevents me from using any of the keyboard shortcuts that I use to open terminals or start programs.

Sometimes both happen at once. Another thing that may be related is that sometimes when I'm looking through pictures I've taken in the Feh image viewer, sometimes Feh will hang, and closing it with a keyboard shortcut will cause the X server or possibly the WM to die, to the same effect that I'm kicked out of X.

Now, I'm beginning to be sure that this isn't a hardware failure. I have Alpine Linux installed in a separate partition because I was messing around with it over the Christmas break. I have no problems with X11 on Alpine, only on Arch and seemingly only since I installed LightDM, persisting now that I've uninstalled it.

I found an old forum post on some other forum where someone blamed freezing cursor on swap, and I disabled my swap (not that it was a very swappy system to begin with, not with the things I usually do with it) to no avail.

Does this sound like anything to anyone?

EDIT: Punctuation

Last edited by RMLangham (2022-02-11 18:50:32)

thehexagon · 2022-02-13 20:24:52

you could go through and see what packages that came with lightdm stayed behind, maybe one of them are causing an issue, or maybe lightdm changed a setting somewhere.

RMLangham · 2022-02-14 15:53:20

I think we can rule out any packages staying behind. I was worried that it'd break something and so I noted down what it and the greeter package (gtk-greeter, I think) were installing and went through and uninstalled those at the same time as I uninstalled lightdm and the greeter. I consider this good practice since it saves me having to check for orphaned packages as often as I otherwise would.

As for a setting it changed...Hmm. I don't know much about X11's input settings. I do call xinput from my .xinitrc in order to reassign my touchpad buttons... the touchpad is too wide so I kept accidentally closing browser tabs by using the middle button instead of the primary (left) button.

xinput --set-button-map 10 1 1 3 &

xinput --set button-map 11 1 1 3 &

Plus I have in the same file:

setxkbmap -option compose:caps

xmodmap -e "keycode 108 = Alt_R Menu Alt_R Meta_R"

The former sets caps lock to be a compose key in the X server,
and the latter turns shift+right alt into a menu key (conspicuously absent from this laptop.)

Because I just call these from .xinitrc (or properly another file, that .xinitrc calls before exec'ing the WM), I never really got into learning where the proper config files for these things are.

Oh, that reminds me... sometimes instead of my cursor freezing, it seems like that xinput setting is undone and suddenly I'm accidentally middle-clicking on things. That hasn't happened much though.

Last edited by RMLangham (2022-02-14 16:04:28)

Arch Linux

#1 2022-02-11 18:48:30

X11 Touchpad and Keyboard Issues on Lenovo Ideapad 3 17" core i5

#2 2022-02-13 20:24:52

Re: X11 Touchpad and Keyboard Issues on Lenovo Ideapad 3 17" core i5

#3 2022-02-14 15:53:20

Re: X11 Touchpad and Keyboard Issues on Lenovo Ideapad 3 17" core i5

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