Artix Linux Forum

Rarely occurring issue with trackpoint not being detected

31 March 2019, 04:28:40

On very rare occasions, e.g 2019-02-19, 2019-03-13, and today, when I boot the Dell M4400  the mouse pointer is slow and sluggish and the side scroll is not working on the touchpad. Desktop mouse settings are lacking options that are usually there. Rebooting fixes it. I had tried comparing sudo lspci -vvv output but found no difference in the two states. Going through the Xorg logs showed them to be line by line identical until near the end at line 626, when the problem Xorg finds a Dualpoint touchpad, not a Dualpoint stick like the good Xorg log, which then goes on to find the Dualpoint touchpad as well.

good and bad Xorg log examples

Don't know why, and it's no big deal, but it's another bug someone might be interested in. 

Re: Rarely occurring issue with trackpoint not being detected

Reply #1 – 31 March 2019, 07:07:34

Revert to a 4.20 kernel or linux-lts and I bet you it will be gone.  Someone else yesterday reported a mouse wheel problem with a microsoft  mouse.  Compare booting seconds too, if you can.

Re: Rarely occurring issue with trackpoint not being detected

Reply #2 – 31 March 2019, 16:11:16

I have installed the lts kernel now, so I will run with that and see if it happens again. I was reading about the best way to select that as the default (on stack overflow  ) but then found that it was automatically selected as the default boot option in preference to the standard kernel after doing grub-mkconfig, so that was very easy to accomplish.

Re: Rarely occurring issue with trackpoint not being detected

Reply #3 – 01 April 2019, 21:08:25

It happened again,  so the lts kernel didn't help. But it was worth a try, thank you for the suggestion. There is no obvious boot time difference, although I don't time boots, but it doesn't hang.