Synaptic Touchpad Not Working/ Unrecognized

[LeonTheMisfit]

Okay so I'm new to Mint and still fairly new to Linux in general but I was will try to as specific as possible. I just installed Mint 10 Julia Debian today and my touchpad does not work at all. It is completely unresponsive. I had the exact same problem in Ubuntu 10.10 but I was able to get the touchpad working by installing various packages in Synaptic. So I assumed (wrongly) that hey both Ubuntu and Mint are Debian based and Mint downloads its packages from Ubuntu servers anyway. So I installed all the same packages I had installed in Ubuntu that got the touchpad working great in Mint and it's still completely unresponsive. When I put xinput in the terminal the touchpad is not showing up at all. I have all the valid xorg and synaptics packages installed and everything is 100% up to date so I'm completely lost as to why these packages got the touchpad working in Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick) and have done nothing to help me in Mint. This is NOT a hardware issue as the touchpad is still functioning in Ubuntu and Windows7 without a problem. If there are any driver packages I may be missing it would be much appreciated if someone could point these out to me.

[LeonTheMisfit]

Sorry I forgot a minor detail, I'm running a Sony Vaio VPCEA36FM.

[LeonTheMisfit]

Another point I should have included in my initial post, I do not have a Fn key for disabling/enabling touchpad and I don't have any type of button to turn the touchpad on and off. Also in Control Center > Mouse there is no third "Touchpad" tab. I only have the standard "General" and "Accessibility" tabs.

[LeonTheMisfit]

Well I've managed to resolve the issue and it turns out that the Synaptics drivers were not the issue. There seems to been another issue that maybe someone could still shed some light on for me. When I was going into Synaptics Package Manager > Status > Installed (Upgradeable) the list was not populating. It was appearing empty. Finally after trying a couple of fixes from the Ubuntu forums I decided to check again and sure enough here sits a single update for xserver-xorg-input-evdev. So I updated hoping and praying that this would fix the touchpad. After a reboot the touchpad was still not functioning or even recognized but I decided that if an update wasn't showing before maybe there are still more. Sure enough here sat a list of Linux Kernel updates as well as other unrelated updates that totaled over 100mb. After updating the various kernel files sure enough the touchpad now works. Now my question is, why the heck didn't those updates show up 4 hours ago?

[dagon]

Now my question is, why the heck didn't those updates show up 4 hours ago?

Because Debian just released Squeeze and the server is overloaded?

[LeonTheMisfit]

I can accept that as a valid reason. Bit frustrating but I'd be happy to know that I wasn't personally doing something wrong.