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How to enable touchpad?

Liam Parker |

Yesterday, suddenly my touchpad on my MSI Laptop started to not respond. In other words, in Login screen, touchpad is working as expected. However, in Desktop screen, after I have logged in, touchpad is not working.

How can I enable touchpad in Desktop?

3

9 Answers

I accidentally disabled my touchpad. This is the way I found to re-enable it.

Press the "Windows key" to open the start menu. Type "terminal" and enter, to open the command line.

Then type:

xinput list

Find the 'id' of your touchpad. For me it looks like this:

Virtual core pointer id=2 [master pointer (3)]
⎜ ↳ Virtual core XTEST pointer id=4 [slave pointer (2)]
⎜ ↳ TPPS/2 IBM TrackPoint id=12 [slave pointer (2)]
⎜ ↳ SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad id=11 [slave pointer (2)]

My touchpad has id = 11.

Then type 

xinput set-prop 11 "Device Enabled" 1

(but replace 11 with whatever id your touchpad had)

2

This work for me on kali linux:

gsettings reset org.gnome.desktop.peripherals.touchpad send-events

The schemas dir can be found by:

gsettings list-schemas

Edit: This works on Ubuntu 18.04 as well.

6

Running Ubuntu 16.04 there is a painfully simple way to re-enable the touchpad if you disabled it via the "Mouse & Touchpad GUI":

  • ALT+TAB to select the "Mouse & Touchpad GUI" if you currently do not have it focused. (Or use the Windows key -> Search for "Mouse and touchpad" -> ENTER)
  • Use TAB to iterate through the items within the GUI until the ON/OFF slider is highlighted.
  • Hit ENTER to toggle the switch back to "ON".

I realize this is very simple, but it took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out.

5

You could try the following command in a terminal and see if it helps, I always used it to restart the touchpad on 11.10 when it stopped working, but I have had no problems on 12.04. 

synclient Touchpadoff=0
4

Make sure that the Touchpad is enabled. On an MSI laptop to Enable or disable the touchpad: FN+F3.

I don't recall having this problem in 12.04 either but running the gpointing-device-settings command and unchecking Disable touchpad always did it for me in 11.10.

1

I'm using Linux Mint and disabled the touchpad, and like others before me, I noticed how hard it is to switch it back on if you don't have a mouse handy.

Using the Mint Preferences to disable the touchpad won't let you enable it again by using xinput or synclient as suggested in various places.

tl;dr

gsettings set org.cinnamon.settings-daemon.peripherals.touchpad touchpad-enabled true

Longer version on how I managed to get it back.

I dumped the cinnamon config to a file with: 

'dconf dump /org/cinnamon/ > mysettings'

Under the heading 'settings-daemon/peripherals/touchpad' i found 'touchpad-enabled=false'

List the schemas and find something related to the touchpad

gsettings list-schemas | grep touchpad

List the keys in the touchpad-schema

gsettings list-keys org.cinnamon.settings-daemon.peripherals.touchpad

Enable the touchpad

gsettings set org.cinnamon.settings-daemon.peripherals.touchpad touchpad-enabled true

Some useful links:

I have had the same problem but I found the fix for mine to be very simple. I unplugged my mouse out of the USB port on the laptop and the touchpad immediately started working again. It disables the touchpad when you have a mouse plugged in. My Laptop's model is the MSI Apache Pro-012 (GE70)

There is a little button at the bottom of your keyboard on the laptop (sometimes just above the touchpad) mine looks like a W but isn't Windows key, if you have that tiny button it enables and disables your touchpad.

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