After installing Jaunty, my touchpad did not work on my sony vaio laptop, I wasnt bothered by this at all since i use my wireless usb about 98% of the time. I thought that Jaunty didn't bother with it since I installed with the usb mouse connected and just skipped over it or had it disabled.

However, I did WANT to get it working. It's an ALPS touchpad and after about 4-6 hours of configuring, reading, etc etc, I still did not have it working. Tried the xorg method and newer hal method (what i am now using), neither of these worked.

I could see the device, every available command on linux you can think of showed the device connected and working. All the settings looked good, etc etc etc. Completely stumped and mentally exhausted at this point. I figured I was missing something. I'm a windows convert fyi just a couple weeks ago now and dual booting at the moment. (Loving linux btw)

Anyway, I knew in vista through the sony vaio control panel I had the touchpad disabled. So on a hunch, I booted into vista and enabled the touchpad through sony's control panel. Boot back into Jaunty and boom, touchpad is working.

And my assumption at this point... the vaio control panel has a hardware/firmware level turn off for the touchpad??? Would be the ONLY thing that makes any logical sense right? Maybe someone can shed some light on this? And God knows what you would do if you removed vista before figuring that out?

Anyway, thought this was extremely interesting find, for myself anyway and decided to share.