Dell XPS 13 9360 journey to linux — trackpad fix

“just use libinput”

Patrick Martin

Jan 5, 2017·2 min read

As part of my occasional series prompted by getting my Dell 9360 to Dual boot to ubuntu, I’ve already worked through quite a few issues to get to a passable build. Here are the the previous posts.

Today, a fix for one of the final issues, which is trackpad weirdness.

I found that as noted in later on installing libinput via its name

sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-input-libinput

worked — the file for me (Xenial Xerius) is found at

/usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/90-libinput.conf

The edit suggested in the link is to add this stanza.

Section "InputClass"
        Identifier "libinput touchpad catchall"
        MatchIsTouchpad "on"
        MatchDevicePath "/dev/input/event*"
        Driver "libinput"
        Option "Tapping" "True"
        Option "PalmDetection" "True"
        Option "TappingDragLock" "True"
EndSection

I found the default installation had already created this entry— with the difference of the entries in bold not being present.

On a hunch (ok, laziness) I wondered if simply installing libinput had done the trick.

One reboot later: looks promising! It’s possible to type for some time without the cursor teleporting to another part of the screen, or the Recycle Bin being summoned unbidden (I know, right?).

Remaining hardware issues: nothing I can report right now.