Sometime (a day or so maybe) before <2024-06-26 Wed 19:59> the touchpad
stopped working on my Acer Aspire 5 with a MATE desktop on debian 12.5.
At the time the laptop had gone 50 days since the last reboot so I
figured something had gone wrong during the time and a reboot would fix
it.
So in <2024-06-29 Sat 18:07> I did a reboot as a result of "apt
full-upgrade" to debian 12.5 and the touchpad still wasn't working.
I have been thinking that the cause may be
1. A hardware failure?
2. I accidentially pressed a keyboard combination that disables the
touchpad?
3. I have accidentially made some configuration change that disables
the touchpad?
But I need help debugging and figuring things out, because all the
guides and error reports I find are old (typically 2016/2017 or older).
Are there any good diagnostics tools that work with the current stack?
(everything I have found has been too old to be useful)
Does anyone know of touchpad disabling keyboard key combinations on Acer
Aspire laptops?
Can the touchpad be switched off without me being in there to do so
(remember the laptop hadn't been rebooted in 50 days when I discovered
the touchpad had gone AWOL, so I haven't been in there to switch things
off)?
So here is what I know:
1. The touchpad worked from day 1 without me having to do anything when
I installed debian 11 on this laptop in 2022
https://steinar.bang.priv.no/2022/07/31/installing-debian-11-bullseye-using-pxe-boot-on-an-acer-aspire-5-a515-45-laptop/
2. The config is untouched by me and uses the libinput driver (which
google has told me has been the standard since 2017)
https://gist.github.com/steinarb/95beb9010d1d8be5c9c9e9e2cbcc1513#file-40-libinput-conf-L33
3. The libinput driver is installed
https://gist.github.com/steinarb/5e606993f01f70c2f3d1a715b0706add
4. The touchpad is an ElanTech touchpad that show up in Xorg.0.log, but
have some suspicious lines at the end ("No input driver specified,
ignoring this device" and "This device may have been added with
another device file.")
https://gist.github.com/steinarb/74016c347396a9f29a437f592c4c43d0#file-xorg-0-log-L386
5. The touchpad shows up as a tab in the "Mouse preferences" dialog of
debian:
https://www.bang.priv.no/screenshots/debian12-touchpad-screenshot-2024-07-02_20-09-20.png
6. I am currently using a logitech MX mastere 3S bluetooth mouse (shows
up in Xorg.0.log as well)
Thanks!
- Steinar
