Thinkpads Forum

Hi,

I am a long time Thinkpad user who has always used and is accustomed to using the Trackpoint. One of the first things I always do is disable the Touchpad because if I don't, my hands brush against it as I'm manipulating the Trackpoint and the inputs overlap which is extremely annoying. Having just recently installed Ubuntu on the machine, I went into the BIOS and disabled the Touchpad. But after booting up, I found that the Touchpad was still active. So, that's the first mystery. Any idea why that wouldn't have worked?

In any event, I did a little poking around Ubuntu and figured out that I could disable it in software. And that leads me to my second and larger problem. It was only after I disabled the Touchpad that I realized that the Trackpoint on the T540p doesn't have it's own associated buttons. I had been using the buttons which are part of the Touchpad without even realizing it. Is there someway to disable the 'pointing' aspects of the Touchpad while at the same time still allowing it to function as buttons for Trackpoint users? If not, this just seems like a mind bogglingly stupid design decision.

If anyone could share their thoughts on either of these issues I'd really appreciate it.

Doing some more research into it-- it looks like the touchpad and trackpoint *button emulation* on top of the touchpad are hard to separate effectively.

The reason being of course is that the touchpad simply changes the behaviour of itself for the top area. The only solid solution I could think of is programming drivers that tell the touchpad to only behave like trackpoint buttons. Or modify the touchpad's BIOS-- I'm assuming it was made by synaptics.

Theokretes wrote:Doing some more research into it-- it looks like the touchpad and trackpoint *button emulation* on top of the touchpad are hard to separate effectively.

The reason being of course is that the touchpad simply changes the behaviour of itself for the top area. The only solid solution I could think of is programming drivers that tell the touchpad to only behave like trackpoint buttons. Or modify the touchpad's BIOS-- I'm assuming it was made by synaptics.

Though I'm a software developer, I'm afraid that hardware drivers are a little out of my bailiwick Seriously though this has grown to annoy me even more as time goes on. I can't be the only one who finds use of the trackpoint to be frustrating with the touchpad also activated. Can I? Did this issue not occur to them?

Same problem as on a T440/T440p.
They are lousy quality and everybody and their old mother are cursing and swearing at Lenovo for making such a rotten touchpad with "built-in" mouse-keys.
If that cannot be deactivated in the BIOS or via software, I suggest you remove the keyboard, and then unlock/remove the flat cable from the touchpad.
You'd also lose the use of those buttons that way...
Alternative: use a mouse.

RealBlackStuff wrote:Same problem as on a T440/T440p.
They are lousy quality and everybody and their old mother are cursing and swearing at Lenovo for making such a rotten touchpad with "built-in" mouse-keys.
If that cannot be deactivated in the BIOS or via software, I suggest you remove the keyboard, and then unlock/remove the flat cable from the touchpad.
You'd also lose the use of those buttons that way...
Alternative: use a mouse.

Though disabling it in the BIOS didn't seem to work, I was able to disable it in software. Disabling it isn't the real problem. The real problem is that once disabled, there are no buttons to go with the trackpoint. This isn't a minor inconvenience; it makes it absolutely 100% unusable. After having disabled the touchpad and realizing that I didn't have any buttons I was absolutely 100% stuck. I could move the cursor but there was no way to even leave the screen I was on. I actually had to go to the store to buy a mouse so that I could reenable the touchpad and make the machine usable again.

A sad state of ThinkPad affairs in my opinion.

One solution and prayer would be to backrev to a T/W530 and pray somehow someway the buttons return on the next refresh.

I don't hold out much hope of that ever happening.

Brad

ts1971 wrote:The real problem is that once disabled, there are no buttons to go with the trackpoint. This isn't a minor inconvenience; it makes it absolutely 100% unusable.

Not true, because you can tap the trackpoint. See http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?f=58&t=113173 .

Brad wrote:A sad state of ThinkPad affairs in my opinion.

Not just Thinkpads, because all new laptops seem to have buttonless touchpads.

Brad wrote:Pray somehow someway the buttons return on the next refresh.

I don't hold out much hope of that ever happening.

Brad

Why pray for something that has already happend? http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=115217

Detail picture related to that: Click me

(if you say that this isn´t a T/W/X: This is the first device of the Broadwell generation and the buttons will return on all T/W/X - just like the first Helix was the first device with the buttonless TrackPad, its successor reverses this)

pianowizard wrote: Not true, because you can tap the trackpoint. See http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?f=58&t=113173 .

That's really interesting. I've used Thinkpads for more than a decade and I never knew anything about that. Having said that, it doesn't work by default on my machine and there is nothing in the Ubuntu settings which will let me turn it on. In fact, there is really no mention of the trackpoint at all, only various configuration settings for the touchpad. Maybe there is something that I can enable in the BIOS? (not that I had much luck with my previous changes to the BIOS)

Maybe I can clear some thing up:

- Disabling the TouchPad in the BIOS doesn´t really disable it - it only sets a flag for the Windows UltraNav driver, so the TrackPad is disabled in Windows (and can´t be re-enabled there)

- Tap-to-click is not an option for any of the new models

- In order to get the TrackPoint working with the integrated buttons under Linux, the TouchPad has to be enabled. Maybe these links will help you to set up the ClickPad under Linux:
https://blog.lnx.cx/2014/03/20/fedora-2 ... -touchpad/
http://who-t.blogspot.de/2013/12/lenovo ... utton.html
http://who-t.blogspot.de/2014/04/t440-t ... inues.html

Note that with the newest kernel, the support for the new TouchPad gets much better for Linux...

Hope that helps!

Hoping on this good news of buttons returning.

Why did they leave?

Brad