Ubuntu – Mouse arrow moving on its own

mousetouchpad

lately I've been having this weird problem. The mouse arrow would for no apparent reason, begin moving diagonally from the right of the screen to the bottom left. This happens regardless if I am using a mouse or the touchpad. Sometimes the way to stop it is to unplug the mouse (if one is attached), or wait for it to settle down at the bottom left corner of the screen. Trying to move the mouse arrow while it is going on it's little joy-ride feels like swimming against a tide. Its really annoying especially if I need to show my supervisor something and the arrow decides to act up..
A colleague has the exact same machine but with Xubuntu installed, and has never had this issue.

p.s. I'm running Unity 14.04 on a Toshiba Portege Z30a notebook.

Edit: output of xinput:

    ⎡ Virtual core pointer                      id=2    [master pointer  (3)]
    ⎜   ↳ Virtual core XTEST pointer                id=4    [slave  pointer  (2)]
    ⎜   ↳ PS/2 Generic Mouse                        id=11   [slave  pointer  (2)]
    ⎜   ↳  USB OPTICAL MOUSE                        id=13   [slave  pointer  (2)]
    ⎣ Virtual core keyboard                     id=3    [master keyboard (2)]
        ↳ Virtual core XTEST keyboard               id=5    [slave  keyboard (3)]
        ↳ Power Button                              id=6    [slave  keyboard (3)]
        ↳ Video Bus                                 id=7    [slave  keyboard (3)]
        ↳ Power Button                              id=8    [slave  keyboard (3)]
        ↳ TOSHIBA Web Camera - FHD                  id=9    [slave  keyboard (3)]
        ↳ AT Translated Set 2 keyboard              id=10   [slave  keyboard (3)]
        ↳ Toshiba input device                      id=12   [slave  keyboard (3)]

Best Answer

It looks like your touchpad is not properly detected. You can disable it by running

xinput disable 11

This should stop this problem, but you will not be able to use touchpad.

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Well, this is not the direct answer, but a suggestion and examples. If you run xinput, you will get list of your devices. Then run xinput list-props $id where $id is your touchpad id in the list.

You will have a list of options like this:

$ xinput list-props 13
Device 'SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad':
    Device Enabled (135):   1
    Coordinate Transformation Matrix (137): 1.000000, 0.000000, 0.000000, 0.000000, 1.000000, 0.000000, 0.000000, 0.000000, 1.000000
    Device Accel Profile (268): 1
    Device Accel Constant Deceleration (269):   2.500000
    Device Accel Adaptive Deceleration (270):   1.000000
    Device Accel Velocity Scaling (271):    12.500000
    Synaptics Edges (292):  1765, 5371, 1637, 4453
    Synaptics Finger (293): 25, 30, 0
    Synaptics Tap Time (294):   180
    Synaptics Tap Move (295):   234
    Synaptics Tap Durations (296):  180, 180, 100
    Synaptics ClickPad (297):   1
    [...]

You can change all of these on-the-fly with xinput set-prop $id $propId $value where $id is the device id, $propId is property id in brackets and $value is what you want it to be. For example:

xinput set-prop 13 135 0 sets Device Enabled (135) to 0 and this will disable the touchpad.

You will need descriptions of properties and a way to make your changes permanent. Descriptions can be found in man synaptics, but wait, they are in another cryptic format! Let's see why.

To make changes permanent, you need to create conf file in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d, for example 30-tochpad.conf with contents like these:

    Section "InputClass"  # you can read more in `man xorg`
            Identifier "all touchpads"  # just a name for this config
            MatchIsTouchpad "on"  # enables this config for all detected touchpads
            Driver "synaptics"  # enables synaptics-specific options below

            # This will disable the device
            #Option "Ignore" "1"

            # There are options that are generic for input-devices or mouse-like devices, see `man evdev`:
            Option "ButtonMapping" "0 0 0 0 0 0 0"  # i disabled all buttons here, for example

            # Here go options from `man synaptics`
            Option "VertTwoFingerScroll" "1"
            Option "HorizTwoFingerScroll" "1"
            Option "PalmDetect" "1"
            Option "ClickPad" "0"                
            # ...etc...
    EndSection

So, man synaptics describes options for xorg.conf and tells how they correspond to xinput list-props output.

PS. I tried to configure trackpoint on my ThinkPad X220 to have only two-fingers-scroll enabled, without clicks or mouse movement. I failed. Maybe you will manage to do what you want (there was an option to disable everything but clicks, maybe Synaptics Off).

Sources, more examples and unicorns:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/Config/Input

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Touchpad_Synaptics

Best Answer

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