Ubuntu – Drivers are not detected on the Dell Inspiron 5420 (14R 3rd generation)

One way to do this would be to

1. Create a folder called /shared;
2. Create a group with any name, such as mediamembers, and add all the users to it. Alternatively, you can allow everyone access);
3. Set yourself as owner, and group as mediamembers (sudo chown -R yourname:mediamembers /shared; alternatively, just set the permissions for /shared to whatever you want for group and the rest of the world;
4. Create subdirectories for video, music, pictures, and move the files there from your home directory;
5. Create symbolic links to these directories in you home directory's subdirectories;
6. In the future, follow the symbolic link to the shared directory to save files.

You could even mount the directory, and in the future, if your media collection got too big, you could put it on a separate disk and mount that in the same place with no changes for the users.

I have mine on a separate partition to solve a different problem, which is to easily access these file when I install a new distro for testing, etc. I just mount the shared partition, and have everything there.

So, I'm not sure what the original problem was, and I'm not entirely sure how my pad is mapped.

That said, I found an interesting work-around here:

• https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Touchpad_Synaptics#Buttonless_TouchPads_.28aka_ClickPads.29

It mentioned changing some options within /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/10-synaptics.conf, but that directory doesn't seem to exist for me. It suggested changing certain values for the percentage of the click-pad to be dedicated to a given button, and then it suggested checking certain parameters within synclient -l. I wound up just manually editing the parameters to match. The boundaries do not seem to match perfectly with the lines marked on my click-pad, but those are completely arbitrary. The differences could be resolved by trial and error if it became an issue, I suppose.

Shift+F10 still does not work, but I have since learned that right-click was simply mapped elsewhere. I don't know where to find the default settings for that particular shortcut; it is not included in the list shown by holding down Super. However, I have learned that it was mapped by default to a button between my right alt and ctrl keys. The key resembles the usual menu, with one bar highlighted. This probably won't be relevant to many folks on non-HP machines.

Thanks, everyone, for taking the time to work with me.