Comments on: Howto fix touchpad issues after karmic upgrade

By: JohnT

JohnT — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 09:44:29 +0000

Good fix advice another way is attach a mouse then go to System > Administration > Synaptic Package Manager and use this to install grub-pc which will take over and display all the installed kernels at Then re- boot.
Choose the latest kernel and your touchpad should be working again

By: aanton

aanton — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 16:11:54 +0000

Thanks a lot for the really useful info! My audio problem has also been fixed, just by updating the kernel number in the menu.lst file.
I have experienced this problem since updating to 9.10 from 9.04.

By: Trevor

Trevor — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 05:36:38 +0000

Great! My touchpad is now functional and not only that, I was finally able to install my NVIDIA graphics driver. All I had to do was make menu.lst recognize the newer version of the kernel and initrd. I am assuming my issue was due to the fact that I kept the current version of GRUB installed when upgrading from 9.04 to 9.10. Thus, the entries for menu.lst needed to be updated.

I initially had vmlinuz-2.6.28-11-generic and initrd.img-2.6.28-11-generic as the files being recognized by menu.lst. In my case, the newer version of these files was 2.6.31-16, so under each entry, I changed the kernel to vmlinuz-2.6.31-16-generic and initrd to initrd.img-2.6.31-16-generic. If you look under /boot, you can find the version number.

By: jai

jai — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 07:25:38 +0000

Thanks for this it really helped I was actually booting into the older kernel because I didn’t update the grub entries when I was upgrading from 9.04 to 9.10, a quick entry in the menu.lst did the job for me

I have a question though, when upgrading or in general if the program tells you to modify Your grub entries what should be done because you get a long list of changes that can be applied like

1. keep the original version installed
2. show a side by side difference
3. show a 3 way difference

their are a couple other options that I may have left out because I forgot them.

By: Evilzee

Evilzee — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 05:11:23 +0000

@MadDog: Thank you!! I have been searching for hours for the solution to the same problem as yours until I found your solution. Much appreciated!

By: jva

jva — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 19:56:22 +0000

I feel for you, Giles.
Same thing here. Only I have 2.6.28-16 kernel (2.6.31 boots to black screen with no way to get out)

By: Giles Harris

Giles Harris — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 14:05:02 +0000

I installed Ubuntu Netbook Remix 9.10 (2.6.31-15-generic #50-Ubuntu SMP) on my Gigabyte T1028M a week ago and I’ve had this touchpad problem. My touchpad is completely dead. I have followed your instructions but have an issue with it. Within /etc/modprobe.d there is nothing called psmouse.conf. I’m at a bit of a loss here cos I’m a raw beginner to Linux and SO much of what I read is complete gobble-de-gook.

By: MadDog

MadDog — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 22:55:23 +0000

I had an issue with the scrolly thing on my trackpad not working. After scratching my head for a long time and googling for hours and hours I discovered firstly /etc/modprobe.d/psmouse.conf was called psmouse.modprobe. So I renamed that. Also in the /etc/modprobe.d/psmouse.conf file there was a line that said
options psmouse proto=exps

so i commented that out and tada! scrolly thingy works now!

might help others to make scrolly thingys work as i have seen lots of people with the same issue on karmic.

Just as a side note this was on a fresh install with x86-64

By: Kevin

Kevin — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 01:28:04 +0000

I read the title and was hoping against hope that this would fix my troubles, until I read this:

>> If this is not your output, then you are using
>> an older version (most probably from jaunty).

I’m not using an older version, but a newer one - 2.6.31-15-generic #49-Ubuntu SMP Fri Nov 6 09:52:03 UTC 2009 i686 GNU/Linux
(I didn’t go the upgrade route)

Then I read:

>> This can be done by editing the default value
>> in /boot/grub/menu.lst file.

But this doesn’t apply w/ ‘grub2′, so unfortunately your howto won’t work for me.

Oh well.