Dell XPS M1530 touchpad is crazy in 8.10; worked in 8.04

[Xitron]

I'm running 8.10 on a Dell notebook XPS M1530. On 8.04 the touchpad worked great. On 8.10, if I touch it, it starts the cursor jumping all over the screen, clicking on things, and raising general havoc. If I look at the konsole, I see characters repeating, as though the keyboard were stuck. If I smack the CTL and ALT keys, the letters stop running amok and I can regain control of my notebook. Current fix is a wireless mouse.

In 8.04, under System-Preferences-Mouse, there was a 3rd tab for the touchpad, enabling you to turn of clicking on touch, etc. This setup only has 2 tabs, and no reference to the touchpad. Aside from that indicating that the OS doesn't know I have a touchpad, it also makes it so I cannot disable the touchpad, so when I accidentally touch it, mayhem ensues.

Google shows that a lot of people are having touchpad issues under 8.10. Has anyone found any answers that help?

Thanks!

Unca Xitron

[nimish]

next time please use the search tool and search for key words such as M1530 mouse, or M1530 touchpad.

first your have to edit the menu.lst in grub

go to /boot/grub: Type cd /boot/grub and press enter

then locate the file menu.lst by typing the command ls

then type the following command to edit the menu.lst file: sudo gedit menu.lst

it will ask you for your password, enter it and gedit will open.

short-cut to this is: sudo gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst

Scroll down until you see the following:

## ## End Default Options ##

right below that you will find your kernel list

Edit the fist first kernel entry. the line which you will have to edit will start with Kernel it's right after the uuid and before the initrd.

Next type i8042.nomux=1 after the quiet and before the splash


you are done. Save and exit and reboot and your touch pad will be working.

[damis648]

Actually, this is caused by a BIOS update and a much simpler way of doing this (so you don't have to do it after every kernel update) would be to:
Open a terminal (Applications>Accessories>Terminal) and input the following:
gksudo gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst
and press enter. You will now see a window open. Press Ctrl+F and search for
defoptions
. This will lead you to a section looking like this:
## additional options to use withsudo update-grub the default boot option, but not with the
## alternatives
## e.g. defoptions=vga=791 resume=/dev/hda5
# defoptions=quiet splash

All you have to do is in the last line of that stanza add the statement
i8042.nomux=1
So it turns out like this:
## additional options to use with the default boot option, but not with the
## alternatives
## e.g. defoptions=vga=791 resume=/dev/hda5
# defoptions=quiet splash i8042.nomux=1
Save the file and close the window now. Back at the terminal, type
sudo update-grub
and then after a reboot you will be good to go!:popcorn: Cheers!

[nimish]

thanks