Monday, September 19, 2011

Ubuntu 10.4 Touchpad Fix

So I see this post for the upcoming version of Ubuntu 10.4.  I get the familiar nerd tingle as I head on over ubuntu.com to download the Beta 1 release and geek out on the couch.

First impression: I like it. Standard incremental improvements. Nice theme. Another win for Linux.

Second impression: Unstable. But that's ok, right? It's Beta 1 and it's my own darn fault.

Third impression: That sinking feeling knowling that while my personal docs are all safe and sound on my separate /home partiion, and while all my favorite 'buntu software is just an apt-get away, I've totally blown away the magic grub boot option that gets my crappy laptop touchpad working.

Well, friends... never again. Because now I've got a blog to share my google research project results with the world. And myself.

Now last time it took forever to figure out the touchpad problem because I had nothing solid to throw at google. "ubuntu touchpad problem". Yeah, no.

Fortunately, I remembered it had something to do with adding a command to the grub boot setup, so that helped me get the answer much quicker this time. 

Update GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT in the file /etc/default/grub so that it includes "i8042.nomux=1".  Now run update-grub and reboot. I have no idea what it means of what it does, but it fixes my driver conflict issue or whatever the hell was the problem.  I could google it and figure it all out, but I'm going to go watch Zombieland on my iPhone.

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