I have a less than a year old Acer AspireOne D255E with a fresh install of Ubuntu 11.10. Everything has been working fine. Great OS and great netbook. But today the touchpad stopped working. It had been working fine. I closed the netbook and when I opened it again, a couple of hours later, I could not move the pointer with the touchpad.
I can not get the pointer to move. I cleaned the touchpad surface well, just in case. Everything else is working fine. All the software updates are up-to-date. I have rebooted several times with no solution. I have attached an USB mouse and the pointer works well. What can I do to troubleshoot the problem?
I have gone to the System Settings, touchpad section, and there is not much that I can do there. I would like to determine first if it is a hardware or software issue and then how to resolve it. Is there a way that I can reinstall the touchpad drivers. just in case it is a software problem? I have been using Ubuntu for nearly a year now and am very happy with it. Are there any wise Ubuntu gurus out there who can help me? Thank you for reading this note.
Best Answer
My daughter complained that the touchpad had stopped working on her Acer Aspire One Happy2 that runs Ubuntu 11.10. It turned out she had accidentally pressed Fn + F7 which disables the touchpad rather than Fn + F8 to mute.
Pressing Fn + F7 brought it back to life.