Installed synaptics-lts-vivid, touchpad stopped responding

**jdkcarlson** · July 18th, 2016

I have a Synaptics SynPS/2 TouchPad with a growing variety of problems on an Acer Aspire R5-471T laptop running Ubuntu 16.04. I have another thread where I've asked about those problems, but this is a new one.

Since installing 16.04 I've noted that I wind up pasting a lot of text I don't want to and accidentally closing tabs, and I realized today both of these unwanted behaviors were due to a middle click that doesn't appear in the trackpad options in the System Settings. I found this advice for disabling right clicks

http://askubuntu.com/questions/21783...of-my-trackpad

and thought I would follow along the first part but disable the middle click instead of the right. So I did

sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-input-synaptics-lts-vivid

The touchpad immediately stopped responding. I did uninstall, but nothing changed. I typically suspend and unsuspend or restart to get this trackpad responding again (it stops maybe once a day lately, so this was not obviously unusual), but trying to suspend, restart, or shut down via the menu items were unsuccessful. So I did a hard reset. When things came back, the desktop icons were blown up to a huge size and the trackpad was still nonresponsive. Clicks do nothing and the cursor doesn't move.

What can I do to get the trackpad up and running again?

**jdkcarlson** · July 19th, 2016

[bump]

For example, is there a standard suite of drivers one uninstalls and reinstalls in this instance? I've found an external mouse more or less works fine, but the trackpad is just not responding anymore.