Ubuntu Synaptics Touchpad issue

Ever since I've had this lappy I've had issues with the synaptics touchpad. Basically what happens is at some point the scroll function disappears and the pointer becomes overly sensitive. Only solution is to log out and back in. But of course it happens again, usually within minutes.

I've lived with this through a number of distros, some more susceptible to this than others. Linspire and openSuse were among the better behaved.

So I've just installed Ubuntu again and the touchpad is crashing as expected. Happening on Gnome, KDE, Fluxbox, XFCE, Enlightenment in fact all desktops and window managers.

So I decided to have a nose in the syslog files and lo and behold some entries relating to the crash.

Feb 17 09:10:52 crossfire2 kernel: [ 5708.828000] psmouse.c: TouchPad at isa0060/serio2/input0 lost sync at byte 1
Feb 17 09:10:52 crossfire2 kernel: [ 5708.832000] psmouse.c: TouchPad at isa0060/serio2/input0 lost sync at byte 1
Feb 17 09:10:52 crossfire2 kernel: [ 5708.832000] psmouse.c: TouchPad at isa0060/serio2/input0 lost sync at byte 1
Feb 17 09:10:52 crossfire2 kernel: [ 5708.836000] psmouse.c: TouchPad at isa0060/serio2/input0 lost sync at byte 1
Feb 17 09:10:52 crossfire2 kernel: [ 5708.836000] psmouse.c: TouchPad at isa0060/serio2/input0 lost sync at byte 1
Feb 17 09:10:52 crossfire2 kernel: [ 5708.836000] psmouse.c: issuing reconnect request

A quick search on the internet shows a possible solution in adding 'i8042.nomux=1' to the grub boot parameters for the kernel.

And 24 hours later all is well!

Hopefully this is an end to this annoying problem and maybe someone else will find this information useful.

Ubuntu Synaptics Touchpad

A question people tend to ask when they have installed Ubuntu is how do I get the synaptics touchpad working.

Here's what I had to do with my install, hopefully it'll do for you as well.

Make sure you have the synaptics touchpad driver working.

Edit your /etc/X11/xorg.conf and make sure you have the following section added.

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Synaptics Touchpad"
Driver "synaptics"
Option "SendCoreEvents" "true"
Option "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
Option "Protocol" "auto-dev"
Option "HorizScrollDelta" "0″
Option "SHMConfig" "on"
EndSection

Make sure that you have selected the right "Device" for your system. By default it may be "/dev/psaux" when in fact it should be "/dev/input/mice"

Next make sure the xorg.conf is actually calling the synaptics in the Server Layout at the end. Here's mine

Section "ServerLayout"
Identifier "Default Layout"
screen "Default Screen"
Inputdevice "Generic Keyboard"
Inputdevice "Synaptics Touchpad"
Inputdevice "stylus" "SendCoreEvents"
Inputdevice "cursor" "SendCoreEvents"
Inputdevice "eraser" "SendCoreEvents"
EndSection

You also need to make sure that the synaptics driver is actually installed!

To wrap things up you may want to install and run qsyaptics to finalize the setup.