Touchpad only partially working on Mint 19.3 & 20 XFCE - SOLVED

[lachelp]

Hi guys,

I am having troubles during USB boots - in 19.3 xfce 64-bit my touchpad does not register clicks or double-clicks of the pad (but using the touchpad's buttons or a mouse works fine.)

I have found that the touchpad used libinput v1.10 while the LMDE 19.3 64-bit uses libinput v1.12 and on that version of LM the touchpad works fine. I used this command in a terminal to find this out:
grep -i "using input driver" /var/log/Xorg.0.log

Can any offer a suggestion as to how to upgrade libinput so we can see if this fixes the problem?

[xenopeek]

Try Linux Mint 20 Xfce? It has libinput 1.15.

[lachelp]

D*mn... And I just d/l-ed and installed 19.3 thinking it was the latest/greatest. Erg!

[lachelp]

Try Linux Mint 20 Xfce? It has libinput 1.15.

That was a bust xenopeek. LM 20 XFCE 64-bit version has the same problem - no touchpad tapping going on.

My machine is a rather ancient Gateway L22, 2GB notebook but I don't have that problem with LMDE 19, Zorin, AntiX, BionicPuppy, etc..

Does anyone know of a setting that could cause this?

[denverjim]

I switched to synaptics driver and works much better.

apt install xserver-xorg-input-synaptics
then logout and log back in.

If it makes the problem worse, then uninstall via: apt remove xserver-xorg-input-synaptics

[lachelp]

I found the painless solution.

In XFCE go to Menu, Settings, Mouse and Touchpad.

On the Devices tab, Hit the Device 'drop-down' and choose your touchpad.

Below that, chose the Touchpad tab and under General click "Tap touchpad to click" and you might also want to select your favorite scroll method...

That's it.

It appears to me that someone in LM development wants to slow the acceptance of LM with this unusual setting, but there it is. Simple in the end.