[CLOSED] Touchpad Toggle Nonfunctional

Deemoney14 · 2011-07-27 18:05:45

My laptop has those "multimedia buttons" that are activated by pressing Fn+[function key]. Most of these work fine (brightness control, volume control, wireless toggle). The one that doesn't is the one that toggles the touchpad. GNOME seems to pick it up and displays the correct on-screen icon for it, but it will not come back after a second, third, fourth, etc., despite showing the correct icon for disabled or enabled. If I log out with Ctrl-Alt-Delete and log back in while it should be enabled, then it comes back (it works on the login screen as well).

So I've done most of the "under the hood" stuff as far as checking drivers and xorg.conf and such. I tried disabling evdev's apparent claim to the touchpad, but no luck. My GNOME is using dconf as its back end, and I found the event handler and the key that's being modified, "org.gnome.settings-daemon.peripherals.touchpad.touchpad-enabled". It seems that the first toggle of the switch is not being caught by GNOME, but each subsequent toggle is. I'm betting that the first toggle went somewhere else, and I'm in this "one says disabled, one says enabled, disabled wins" loop. If I disable the dconf key that has "XF86TouchpadToggle" listed (which is, for the record, "org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.media-keys.touchpad"), then nothing happens period except the "disabled" light above my touchpad turns on and off. I just don't know where that first toggle is going and how to synchronize this button's functionality.

The laptop is a Dell Inspiron N4110, using Intel integrated graphics (latest generation Sandy Bridge Core i3 processor; I know there are driver issues, not sure if they're related). I have xf86-input-synaptics installed, just ran pacman to update and everything is as new as can be. DE is GNOME 3 (again, not sure if this is the culprit or not; will try fallback mode and see what happens).

Any help is greatly appreciated. Let me know what additional information I can provide to help narrow down the problem. I know people with other laptops have had similar issues, so I'm wondering if either there's a common thread or solutions/workarounds already exist.

Last edited by Deemoney14 (2011-07-30 23:58:08)

Deemoney14 · 2011-07-30 04:45:04

bump

Deemoney14 · 2011-07-30 23:57:49

Closing the issue. It was GNOME related, I'll say that much. I switched to KDE, and Qt doesn't even recognize the message being sent (XF86ToggleTouchpad). X was catching the message, but wasn't doing anything with it (I noticed this when I loaded a simple X only session and tried the key combo). I hacked my way around it using xbindkeys and a simple one line script I found on the internet, similar to the Wiki's suggestion for a software-level setup.

Would like to know what was going on. I actually tried to track what was going on in Ubuntu when I toggled it there, and it seems something similar happens: it gets shut off and never gets turned back on according to xinput. So there really must be some meta-daemon or something patched into Ubuntu to cover that instance.

lamdacore · 2011-08-01 11:03:05

What was the script you used for the software level fix?

Deemoney14 · 2011-08-01 15:20:52

I followed the instructions on the wiki page for Synaptics touchpad: install xbindkeys, find the key sequence your touchpad toggle sequence uses. But instead of the script they suggest, I found this one-liner searching the internet:

/usr/bin/synclient TouchpadOff=`expr $(synclient -l | grep TouchpadOff | grep -o .$) = 0`

The person who posted this initially actually did so while installing Arch Linux . It works, I can assure you of that.

lamdacore · 2011-08-01 21:28:15

thanks. Works like a charm.

Arch Linux

#1 2011-07-27 18:05:45

[CLOSED] Touchpad Toggle Nonfunctional

#2 2011-07-30 04:45:04

Re: [CLOSED] Touchpad Toggle Nonfunctional

#3 2011-07-30 23:57:49

Re: [CLOSED] Touchpad Toggle Nonfunctional

#4 2011-08-01 11:03:05

Re: [CLOSED] Touchpad Toggle Nonfunctional

#5 2011-08-01 15:20:52

Re: [CLOSED] Touchpad Toggle Nonfunctional

#6 2011-08-01 21:28:15

Re: [CLOSED] Touchpad Toggle Nonfunctional

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