Trackpad stopped working

Hardware
1

The trackpad on my new Librem 13v2 stopped working. I am running PureOS.

I received the laptop yesterday. Today it hung/crashed while trying to set the trust to “ultimate” on my gpg key that I had imported. After rebooting, the trackpad is completely unresponsive. A USB mouse works.

Is there anything I can try to get the trackpad working again?

2

Rebooting didn’t fix it. Power off and rebooting didn’t fix it.

Power off and a reset via the tiny button on the left side did fix it.

The Librem 13 is a very strange machine.

3

A software glitch, probably. It can be of help to examine the output of the sudo libinput list-devices command in terminal. You need to have libinput-tools package installed for this (install it by running sudo apt update && sudo apt install libinput-tools)

1 Like
4

I am having this same issue on my 13v2, the trackpad just stopped working, as well as other hardware on my machine, e.g. left side USB port no longer works.

5

Steps to debug hardware issues of your touchpad:

  1. Update your system!
  2. Boot other GNU/Linux live system to see if touchpad there works.
  3. Check if the back cover screws are tightened.
  4. Open the back cover, inspect the FPC cable for bents and damages, check if it is connected properly to the touchpad and to the motherboard, reconnect it.

If nothing helps, contact @support to ask for RMA repair.

6

Thanks, I’ve sent @support a message about my various hardware issues.

7

Hey mladen,
I understand why you would suggest this, but wouldn’t doing so expose the user to different risks, if the user would pick a distro that runs proprietary software? Thanks

8

Then just use Trisquel, PureOS or other endorsed distro.

9

I also had the trackpad (on my Librem 15) go dead on me, and mladen’s advice to tighten the back cover screws seems to have worked. I opened the cover, confirmed the internal cables looked fine, and screwed it back closed. And behold, I had trackpad control again.

Just mentioning this in case others experience the same problem.

10

Before you even update, your system, there’s apparently a way to toggle your trackpad:

I have no idea why it’s this easy to turn it on or off. It makes it seem like everything is broken and even persists after a reboot (although at some point, I did Alt+SysRq+R, so that may have something to do with it).It seems to me the main use case is to permanently disable the trackpad because you have a mouse instead, but I hit this combo accidentally and couldn’t find any info. So, I was considering massive changes to get my “broken” trackpad to work. :confused:

2 Likes