Cannot get PS/2 touchpad to work on old laptop
I have one small problem with a Debian install on with a very old laptop
(P266, 64MB, 800x600) which is badged as a 'Lifetec' but is really a
Twinhead Slimnote 9TE. It has a touchpad, or 'pointing device', as the
manufacturer calls it, which the spec says is a "TwinTouch II". It
originally ran Windows 98 perfectly acceptably.
Some months back, I installed Etch and had it working well using IceWM,
with the only problem being the touchpad not working. Plugging in a USB
mouse was a solution, but it niggled that the touchpad would not work.
It appeared not to be recognised at all with neither lshw nor lspci
showing anything relevant and messing with xorg.conf got me nowhere.
Googling for TwinTouch II produced no useful results with most matches
being for a totally different 'TwinTouch'.
Knowing it had worked under Windoze, I decided it might be quicker to
reinstall it temporarily just to see if I could learn anything more
about this hardware. Doing this proved straight away that it does 'just
work' without any special drivers required and the 'device manager'
showed the touchpad to be treated simply as a PS/2 mouse. Also, the
Windows 'control panel' mouse configuration allowed me to set up and
configure sensitivity, double click (tap) speeds etc.
With a small hard drive, dual boot was not an option, so I have now
started over again with Linux; this time with Lenny (2.6.22-3-486).
Again, the touchpad is not working and is not listed in lshw. I even
tried plugging in a PS/2 mouse to see if that made any difference, but
with no success. And as before, a USB mouse works perfectly.
As I do not think the is a problem with X as such, I next tried running
gpm in a console so I could play with different mouse types using -t,
but so far without success, despite trying all of the PS/2 related ones.
So far, all I have found which looks useful are the following two lines
in dmesg:
PNP: PS/2 Controller [PNP0303,PNP0f13] at 0x60,0x64 irq 1,12
mice: PS/2 mouse device common for all mice
lsmod showed no obvious mouse module present, so I have done modprobe
psmouse and then tried again with gpm, but without success.
I would be grateful for any suggestions regarding what to try next
please.
Many TIA
--
Bob Cox. Stoke Gifford, near Bristol, UK.
Registered user #445000 with the Linux Counter: http://counter.li.org/
Debian on NSLU2 Slug: http://bobcox.com/slug/
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