Elan touchpad - only left click works

[chameleonskin]

Hello - I'm having an odd problem that I haven't find an answer for by searching around so far. I have an Acer 14 Chromebook with an Elan touchpad. Left clicking works as expected, but nothing else does (movement, two-finger scrolling, tap, etc.). Unsurprisingly the touchpad is being seen by xinput (since click works). I also verified with evtest that the trackpad movement is in fact generating events.

Given the above, my assumption is that this is an Xorg problem and not a driver issue but I'm not at all certain of that. I suppose it's also possible that the wrong driver is being loaded. However I did verify on my working GalliumOS hd install that lsmod shows elan_i2c as being loaded, and I see that it is also being loaded when I boot Porteus.

So does this sound like an X problem, or something else? Ideas of what I should investigate or try?

[roadie]

@chameleonskin

My Elan touchpad is working in Porteus v5.0, right click, scrolling, left click all work. Here is what lsmod shows for mine:

Code: Select all

hid_multitouch
i2c_hid
pinctrl_amd
i2c_hid_acpi
i2c_piix4
elan_i2c

Strangely, it seems the elan_i2c isn't needed as I can modprobe -r elan_i2c and the touchpad still works. If you have Intel, the pinctrl_amd would not be used. A pinctrl module matching your machine would be needed though. I use a kernel customized for my laptop, but I would think all the pinctrl modules are included in the Porteus kernel, though I haven't tried it.

I assume you've checked the desktop settings for the touchpad......though I did nothing with mine in Xfce4 and it's fine. Possibly compare the lsmod output from your GalliumOS and Porteus. You could also compare the dmesg | grep ELAN output, see if something is different.

[chameleonskin]

It's working!

I realized that GalliumOS wasn't the best standard for comparison since they use this custom Chromium OS driver that was ported to Linux because of its gestures support. I'd like to do that at some point but it would be substantially more involved due to dependencies. Instead, I looked at my working Linux Mint installation that I run from an ISO on USB. By comparing anything having to do with "elan" in /var/log/Xorg.0.log, what I found was that Mint uses libinput rather than synaptics as the input driver. I further recalled that there are other distros I've seen where they said to try swapping one of those drivers for the other (and that they don't play well together); depending on your specific hardware it may help.

Consequently I uninstalled xf86-input-synaptics, installed xf86-input-libinput, added a few options to my xorg configuration files and restarted X. Now I'm able to do everything with my touchpad that I'm able to do in other working distros.

For anyone else with an Acer Chromebook 14 or that is having a similar problem who comes here looking for help, these are the exact steps that fixed it:

1. removepkg xf86-input-synaptics
2. download xf86-input-libinput (I downloaded it from http://slackware.nl/slakfinder)
3. installpkg xf86-input-libinput
4. cp /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/40-libinput.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d
5. edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d (i.e. the copy you put in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d - the one in /usr/share may get overwritten)
6. in the section with Identifier "libinput touchpad catchall", right under the line Driver "libinput", add the following 2 lines:
* Option "Tapping" "On"
* Option "ClickMethod" "clickfinger"
6a. FYI those two options above turn on tapping for button presses in addition to clicks, and letting you 2- and 3-finger tap for right and middle clicks.
7. log out, log back in for the changes to take effect

For reference, here is a good description of all the gestures that libinput provides for trackpads:
https://wayland.freedesktop.org/libinpu ... ttons.html

And here is a list of other options you can use in step 6 above to further customize your trackpad experience:
https://smarttech101.com/libinput-fix-y ... -libinput/

Thanks for the help!

[Ed_P]

Thank you chameleonskin for the update and the steps to help others.