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Dell Latitude Touchpad Deadzone and Fingerprint (discuss.tchncs.de)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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I recently got my hands on a Dell Latitude E7470 and installed Fedora Workstation. Even though I enabled two finger scroll (and disabled touchpad edge scroll), the right side of the touchpad still has a dead zone of considerable size. So, when I start a mouse movement too far on the right side, it wont register.

I tried a few things, like adding quirk configs, but the zone is still there. Bios had no option to disable. (I reinstalled with UEFI, prior installation was legacy uefi / bios, so I have to give it a look again).

Does someone have a way to disable the dead zone?

Also, the fingerprint sensor doesn't work. From what I could research, it is a broadcom device with officials drivers for MS and Ubuntu. I tried some stuff to get this thing running, but it didn't work out. I still have to try a bios update after the reinstall. Is there a way to get this thing running under Fedora? It's not a crucial feature, but a nice to have for sure.

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[–] 8 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Try Linux Mint or Ubuntu live usb and see if it has the issue fixed for you. If yes, check if they have a different config and copy it over. If not, but it still works better, you might want to move to a debian-based distro. If it also doesn't work, maybe not much you can do, might be one of these weird dell touchpads that don't work correctly -- i have one of these...

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    The Ubuntu live USB made no difference. Same problem plus Ubuntu kept crashing stuff all the time, so I guess I will stay on Fedora and just live with it.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    yeah, it's just not fully compatible that touchpad it seems.

    However, there's a trick.

    These DELL laptops have an ubuntu equivalent usually. They used to sell them with either Windows or Ubuntu -- in cooperation with Canonical. And Canonical had SPECIAL repos for these laptops (different for each model), where you could find special driver versions for some hardware. This meant that you were stuck in the version of ubuntu LTS the laptop came with. You couldn't upgrade it to a newer version or to another distro. So I'd suggest you check if that model has an ubuntu equivalent, and then find their repo and see what kind of drivers they have for it. https://ubuntu.com/certified/laptops?vendor=Dell

    If it's not there, it just means that this hardware piece is not compatible with linux period... It happens, Linux can't support absolutely everything out there, especially since they have been developing for Windows and not for linux.

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