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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 (6 children)

If you got it second hand, could it be a defective touchpad?

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  • [–] [S] 5 points 1 year ago* (5 children)

    I don't think so. If the movement starts outside the "dead zone", the touchpad works fine even within the "dead zone". Only if the movement starts in the dead zone, it's actually dead and its exactly the size of the "edge scroll zone", when the option is enabled.

    I had a Dell Latitude at work a few years ago, I don't know if it was this exact model number, but the same series. And iirc on there was a driver option to disable the "dead zone" under microsoft.

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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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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago

    This sounds similar to one we had at work recently. on a new model Dell Latitude, however all we are Windows so I cant provide much assistance and Win11 has changed our whole touch pad config experience. None of the devices we have have the advanced component manufacturer settings windows anymore. Only the generic Windows settings options.

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    • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    So it looks like the touchpad problem is a known issue with that particular model. A web search turned up an Arch Linux forum post from 2017 with the same issue. Unfortunately, there was no solution posted.

    Your touchpad shows up as a PS/2 device, right? I have a ThinkPad A475 with a PS/2 trackpad that won’t function at all in Linux unless I add i8042.reset as a GRUB argument.

    Maybe see if that helps?

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Your touchpad shows up as a PS/2 device, right?

    Yes.

    I am not an expert with GRUB at all. For some reason, this sounds very aggressive and with a high chance of side effects. Theres nothing of worth on the device though, so I guess I'll give it a try.

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    • [–] 5 points 1 year ago

    maybe playing around some values in synclient can fix it. that's how i created a dead zone in my panasonic laptop. (some area is keep touched while using keyboard so)

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