Aspire V5-131 Touchpad Issues. Loss of control.

[kevinmstein]

I'm having a problem with my Acer Aspire V5-131's Touchpads that appears to be related to Ubermix 1.32, to which we recently updated.  While students are using the netbooks the mouse cursor starts to jitter on the screen (and sometimes slowly drifts to the left) without anyone touching it.  Turning the mouse off and then on using the Fn+F7 does not fix the issue.  Observing a classroom with the issue showed that about of third of the 40 netbooks had the issue over the course of 4 class periods.  The teacher in the room reported that it apparently also occurred when the netbooks were running Ubermix 1.082.

While the issue is occurring, the touchpad acts like it is in multi-touch mode even if only a single finger is used.  Trying to move the mouse with a single finger ends up just scrolling the page or launcher.  None of the settings configurable using "synclient" command utility solve the problem, but if two finger scrolling is turned off the mouse just totally stops responding to input.

I have noticed that those netbooks which have the problem more often are using Synaptics Touchpad hardware instead of the ELANtech Touchpad (which is also a shipping hardware config).

The only working solution is to close the lid of the netbook, wait 5-10 seconds, then open the lid.  Once the netbook resumes the problem no longer exists. 

One additional piece of information is that neither the tech support person at the site nor I can get the problem to happen.  It only happens to students.

[cscottsy]

Hi,

We've had the same problems with our Acer v5-131.

Any solutions?

Chris Scott
Santa Ynez School

[kevinmstein]

Here's what we found that eliminated about 96% of the issues:

I created a file named 52-synaptics-more-quirks.conf and pushed it out via the Network-Autostart script to the location: /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/

The file makes changes to the Synaptic Client (Touchpad Driver) for the two models of touchpad that ship with the Acer-V5-131's.  For the Synaptic Touchpad it modifies the settings for Hysteresis which is the distance away from the touchpad a finger can be above and still be detected.  For the Elantech is reduces the sensitivity of the touchpad so that more pressure is required to move the mouse.

For the remaining 4% of our classrooms that still have issues (only 35 devices, out of over 1000 deployed) we ended up purchasing external mice for about $7 a mouse and fixed the issue that way.

Contents of the file

Code: [Select]

Section "InputClass"
Identifier "Acer Aspire V5-131"
MatchIsTouchpad "on"
MatchProduct "SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad"
MatchDevicePath "/dev/input/event*"
Driver "synaptics"
Option "HorizHysteresis" "150"
Option "VertHysteresis" "150"
EndSection

Section "InputClass"
Identifier "Acer Aspire V5-131 Elan"
MatchIsTouchpad "on"
MatchProduct "ETPS/2 Elantech Touchpad"
MatchDevicePath "/dev/input/event*"
Driver "synaptics"
Option "FingerLow" "10"
Option "FingerHigh" "20"
EndSection