Precision 5510 jumpy touchpad in BIOS and X

Question

I've just received a Precision 5510 and have been setting about installing Arch on it. While fiddling around in the BIOS setting boot order etc. I noticed the pointer jumping erratically, but didn't give it as much thought as I should have done. I've now got to the point of starting X after wiping and reinstalling Arch over the Ubuntu that shipped with the device, and I'm experiencing the same, I believe touchpad related, pointer jumping as before. Has anyone else experienced this? Is it likely to be a hardware fault needing a return? Or something which would be fixed by a BIOS or other firmware update ... the machine shipped with BIOS version 01.02.00, while the latest is 01.02.10. Or something which would be fixed, at least in X, with a device specific driver installed?

mmirg · Answer

I've noticed the same behavior in the BIOS in both 01.02.00 and 01.02.10. I have generally had good results in xorg using the libinput driver for my touchpad though, tracking generally seems to be smooth, clickfinger multitouch support seems to also work well (apart from an occasional bug where it stops detecting three fingers properly until a restart). I can't speak to using the synaptics driver (or something else) but I know a few others on here use synaptics instead of libinput.

milessabin · Answer

Thanks for the pointer. I can confirm that libinput does the trick under X. Strange that the touchpad is enabled but unusable in the BIOS.

milessabin · Answer

Unfortunately that seems to have only been a temporary fix :-(

milessabin · Answer

I'm now wondering if it's the touchscreen which is the culprit rather than the touchpad.

I'd disabled it and will report back.

Apropos touchscreen firmware ... I see that there's an update available ... how would that be installed without a Windows machine available?

Linux General

Was this post helpful?