Debian operating system

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Debian is a free operating system (OS) for your computer. An operating system is the set of basic programs and utilities that make your computer run. Debian provides more than a pure OS: it comes with over 59000 packages, precompiled software bundled up in a nice format for easy installation on your machine.

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Inspiron 14 5140 Touchpad issues (self.debian)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by l0st_scr1b3 to c/debian@lemmy.ml

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First of all, thank you @Thief@Thief@lemmy.one for offering to help. You inspired me to go ahead and post an issue that's been bothering me.

I posted about it on Reddit a while back and didn't receive much in the way of assistance. I'm using an Inspiron 14 5410 and dualbooting Debian Bullseye and Windows 11. I recently started experiencing (again) touchpad issues. Initially it happened just after a Windows/BIOS update, then vanished after another one. Now after my most recent Windows update it's returned. On boot my touchpad works fine, but periodically it will stop functioning. I am still fully able to click with my mouse buttons, but unable to move my cursor.

xinput test 11

produces nothing unless I click a mouse button while the touchapd isn't working. I'm not accidentally disabling it with a key either, I've checked for that. I'm running nonfree drivers/firmware. I can share output of xinput list and any other logs (with some advice on how to pull them) if necessary.

Closing and reopening my laptop (signing back in) corrects the issue. I'm not sure if Xserver restarts on a suspend/login?

Any nudge in the right direction would be greatly appreciated. Thank you to any and all who can offer advice.

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[–] Parsnip8904 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm not an expert in this but why don't you run dmesg -T and find out if anything shows up in the kernel logs when it stops working? That can be a good starting point.

Are you using libinput or synaptics driver? (I don't know which one is bundled in Debian now). If you're on libinput, you might have to make a custom config file for your device?

[–] l0st_scr1b3 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I'm honestly not even sure how to check which I'm running. I'll check dmesg for any error logs though, thanks!

[–] Parsnip8904 2 points 1 year ago

libinput list-devices is your friend. You can also look for config files in /etc/x11/xorg.conf.d/

Once you have something from dmesg I would be glad to help.

Reference

[–] Thief@lemmy.one 2 points 1 year ago

You already got some good advice where to start but I would also say these kind of sporadic issues are very hard to resolve. Also worth thinking about is the next version of Debian is about to release and is frozen right now so safe to upgrade to (bookworm). These kind of issues might already be fixed in a newer version if upgrading was possible. Try what was suggested by Parsnip in the other comments and report back on how you feel and want to progress. Can provide the sources.list for bookworm.