renzhi

Since upgrading to Ubuntu 10.10, my laptop’s touchpad has been giving me problems. The left button does not work anymore. Actually, it works occasionally, but it always stops working especially when I need it the most, so it might as well be considered not working at all.

Only the left button is not working though, tapping and the right button are working just fine, even vertical scrolling on the right edge works too.

Since the left button is the most used in a pointing device, if it’s not working, then you might consider that the pointing device is not there anyway.

On the xev console, clicking on the left button does not generate any X event at all. Either the hardware has problem, or the touchpad driver has an issue. I can certainly use my USB mouse, but then, when I need to work on my lap on some occasions (it’s a laptop computer, isn’t it?), there’s no place for the USB mouse.

Annoying as hell, until I install the gpointing-device-settings package. It has an option to enable locked drags, which has the same effect as holding down the left button and dragging on the pad.

Here’s what you need to do:

sudo apt-get install gpointing-device-settings

After installing, do the following configuration:

1. start up gpointing-device-settings
2. On the General tab, check the Enable locked drags option.

Locked drags enable you to perform a one-and-a-half tap and perform a drag of your window, slider, or select some texts. One-and-a-half tap is like a double-tap on the pad, but you don’t release your finger after the second tap. At the second tap, you hold your finger on the pad, and you should see your mouse icon change to a grabbing hand.

That’s it, now you have the same effect as holding down the left button while dragging on the pad.