Recent Loss of Trackpad Functionality

Hello Team - We’ve been installing EOS on some ASUS X540SA machines for a few months now. Originally, Endless 2.6 (I believe). Recently, maybe a month ago Endless 3.0 became our default install. On 3.0 machines, there was some trackpad sensitivity, but nothing major. Today, I downloaded and installed the most recent Endless (3.0.7 I believe) and the trackpad on my machines is non-responsive. Thinking that was strange I opened a machine that made about a month ago, on an earlier 3.0.X release and the trackpad was fine. I plugged that machine into internet, rebooted it, and now that machines trackpad is also non-responsive. Any chance you’ve come across this issue?

Thanks!

A post was split to a new topic: Sound output not working

@worldpossible
The next major update to take place in meiados January.

1 Like

well in a way I have the same thing when I have my cellphone plugged into the usb port sometimes my trackpad and\ or it’s buttons doesn’t work so then when I unplug my cellphone I sometimes have to plug it into one of the other usb ports on my computer in order to get it to work. I almost had to plug in a usb mouse because it was that bad. So please fix this. When you can.

Hi, @worldpossible.

We have an ASUS X540SA in our office, and I’ve tried to reproduce this problem without success. I tested version 3.0.4 (which was previously installed on the machine), 3.0.7 (running from a bootable USB drive), and 3.0.10 (after updating the machine to the latest release). In all cases, the touchpad worked fine.

It is possible that the machine you purchased (especially if it was purchased with Windows rather than with Endless) has a different touchpad device than the one that we have tested during our work with ASUS.

Oh – one other thing to try… The laptop has a touchpad enable key, and I have seen some cases on other laptops where the functionality mysteriously gets disabled and just needs a simple keypress to fix… Assuming you have the same keyboard layout as the X540SA here, please press fn + f9 to toggle the touchpad enablement.

If that doesn’t work, please provide an eos-diagnostics report so that we can understand exactly what touchpad hardware you have and can try to assist you further.

Thanks!

Roddy

Hi guys - this appears to be a more sporadic issue, we’re getting multiple field reports on it. The fix in the field has been reported as:

Thanks Frank.

Actually when I went into the BIOS, the track pad was on. So we turned it off and rebooted. Went right into the BIOS again and turned the track pad back on and booted the system. Then the track pad was active.

Hope this helps.

Respectfully,
Gary Westoby,
PbS State Coordinator
Oregon Youth Authority

It seems to be a somewhat regular occurrence, and may be related to external USB devices being plugged in. I don’t have an eos-diagnostics file from the field, but can recreate here and upload shortly.

We have 10 machines as a pilot and have had to resolve the touch pad issue on most of them. However, the fix seems to be only temporary. Since I don’t have the devices on site, I can’t give you the OS version but can tell you they are all ASUS X540SA machines. I have the S/N of the machines but won’t be able to verify the OS until next week.

Our systems are in a correctional environment and thus we have turned off a lot in the bios. So on all 10 we have blocked the following:

  • Camera
  • DVD player
  • External USB ports
  • Wireless
  • RJ45 connector

We did not disable the SD card reader as it created a lot of instability, hangs on start and wont’ completely shut down.

We experienced the touch pad issue as well. When it happens, I have to log into the BIOS and disable the touch pad, save and reboot. During reboot, go back into the BIOS and re-enable the touch pad and reboot. Then the touch pad would work.

We also tried enabling the external USB ports and when the pad died, plugged in a wired mouse and that fixed the issue as well. So it appears to be an incompatible touch pad driver for the version of Ubuntu that is running.

Hope this helps.

Blessings,

Gary Westoby,
Oregon Youth Authority

@gwestoby
Anyway, something that would help us a lot to understand the problem would be this:

  1. Open the application called ‘Terminal’
  2. In this application run the command: eos-diagnostics
  3. The above command will create a file with the information of your system (example: eos-diagnostic-160614_111731_UTC + 0100.txt); Send us this file so we can analyze and see a possible solution

@worldpossible
Anyway, something that would help us a lot to understand the problem would be this:

  1. Open the application called ‘Terminal’
  2. In this application run the command: eos-diagnostics
  3. The above command will create a file with the information of your system (example: eos-diagnostic-160614_111731_UTC + 0100.txt); Send us this file so we can analyze and see a possible solution

Leandro,

I will be on site next Wednesday. I will follow your recommendations and see if I can get the diagnostic file for you to analyze. Thanks for the instructions.

Gary Westoby
Oregon Youth Authority

Hi team - this morning while booting up some of the ASUS X540SA devices I had, the third one is experiencing the trackpad issue. I didn’t have any external USB devices plugged in, though the device may have been resuming from hibernate. Regardless, attached is the eos-diagnostics file from this device. Today, the sound is working on all three machines tested so far… go figure. I have nine more machines around here I’ll keep booting up.eos-diagnostic-170105_113153_UTC-0800.txt (260.3 KB)

I published a quick video also so you can see the trackpad enable/disable attempt, which did not work:

Endless Trackpad

problema no reconoce touchpad
eos-diagnostic-170505_191102_UTC-0500.txt (244,8 KB)

1 Like

I’ve similiar problem this morning, I just open my laptop (from suspend) and the multitouch not working (can’t scroll).eos-diagnostic-171120_084942_UTC 0700.txt (245.8 KB)

I’ve seen on some laptops that have a function key to enable / disable the touchpad (on mine it’s F6), that the touchpad will sometimes start disabled when you open the laptop lid. I’m not sure if this is the same issue that others are experiencing on this thread, but my issue is known and in our bugtracker.

As a workaround, I press the touchpad function key to re-enable the touchpad in those cases when it’s disabled.