Feedback on the Lenovo ThinkPad Edge E520

This question was expired because it remained in the 'Open' state without activity for the last 15 days.

re-opened

Can you please provide more information on what you mean by "can't get it to work"?

Does it work at all? (basic single-finger pointer moving, single click, etc)

Are there any error messages after you boot in /var/log/syslog relating to the Synaptics device?

I tested our E520 for 12.04 personally, and know that the Synaptics touchpad worked on that system.

Have you updated to the latest bits (12.04.1 as of this answer) just in case a kernel or driver fix has resolved this?

There is 1 trackpoint + 3 buttons and 1 touchpad + 2 buttons on this laptop. None of them respond to any event I could think of - not a single touch, not a drag, not a click, not a double click.
To make things more interesting, using an external mouse works just fine - it can click, double click, middle click, scroll.

The lines from /var/log/syslog that seem to be relavant are:
kernel: [ 15.205492] psmouse serio1: synaptics: Touchpad model: 1, fw: 7.5, id: 0x1e0b1, caps: 0xd000b3/0x0/0xa0400
kernel: [ 6976.654678] psmouse serio1: synaptics: Touchpad model: 1, fw: 7.5, id: 0x1e0b1, caps: 0xd000b3/0x340000/0xa0400
kernel: [ 15.383107] psmouse serio1: synaptics: Touchpad model: 1, fw: 7.5, id: 0x1e0b1, caps: 0xd000b3/0x340000/0xa0400
kernel: [ 15.078304] psmouse serio1: synaptics: device claims to have extended capabilities, but I'm not able to read them.
kernel: [ 15.205500] psmouse serio1: synaptics: serio: Synaptics pass-through port at isa0060/serio1/input0
kernel: [ 31.109900] psmouse serio2: Failed to deactivate mouse on synaptics-pt/serio0
kernel: [ 31.557500] psmouse serio2: Failed to enable mouse on synaptics-pt/serio0
kernel: [ 3814.789853] psmouse serio2: Failed to disable mouse on synaptics-pt/serio0
kernel: [ 3821.241317] psmouse serio1: synaptics: Unable to initialize device.
kernel: [ 3825.686250] psmouse serio1: synaptics: Unable to query device.
kernel: [ 6976.654678] psmouse serio1: synaptics: Touchpad model: 1, fw: 7.5, id: 0x1e0b1, caps: 0xd000b3/0x340000/0xa0400
kernel: [ 6976.654686] psmouse serio1: synaptics: serio: Synaptics pass-through port at isa0060/serio1/input0
kernel: [ 6976.956972] psmouse serio3: Failed to reset mouse on synaptics-pt/serio0
kernel: [ 6993.477493] psmouse serio3: Failed to deactivate mouse on synaptics-pt/serio0
kernel: [ 6993.925459] psmouse serio3: Failed to enable mouse on synaptics-pt/serio0
kernel: [ 15.331177] psmouse serio1: synaptics: device claims to have max coordinates query, but I'm not able to read it.
kernel: [ 15.383107] psmouse serio1: synaptics: Touchpad model: 1, fw: 7.5, id: 0x1e0b1, caps: 0xd000b3/0x340000/0xa0400
kernel: [ 15.383114] psmouse serio1: synaptics: serio: Synaptics pass-through port at isa0060/serio1/input0
kernel: [ 31.292021] psmouse serio2: Failed to deactivate mouse on synaptics-pt/serio0
kernel: [ 31.740012] psmouse serio2: Failed to enable mouse on synaptics-pt/serio0
kernel: [ 36.223883] psmouse serio2: Failed to enable mouse on synaptics-pt/serio0

Yes, I think I'm using the latest release, because lsb_release -a | grep Description and cat /etc/issue both return "Ubuntu 12.04.1".

BTW, before you responded, I've submitted this as a bug at https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xserver-xorg-input-synaptics/+bug/1083783 and attached some debug information there too.

Out of curiosity, could you download 12.10, make a bootable USB key and boot into the live session and see if they work there?

I'll see if I can get one of our lab guys to put 12.04 on the E520 there and find out if something broke...

Actually, my colleague suggested me the same thing a week ago, so I've downloaded 12.10 and booted the live DVD.
Unfortunatelly, it yielded same results - single touch, drag, click, double click - all not working. Trackpoint movements neither.
External mouse works fine.
If this weren't a new laptop, I'd come to think that my touchpad+trackpoint doesn't work, in a hardware sense.. (I don't know how to test that withou installing Windows instead of my OS; which is something I really wanted to avoid at all cost from the start).

This question was expired because it remained in the 'Needs information' state without activity for the last 15 days.

Excuse me, but I provided needed information, I don't understand why this question expired?

If I can provide additional inforamtion, I'd be glad to.

Can you run this script on that machine:
http://people.canonical.com/~jlane/touchpad_driver_info (needs python3 installed, should be OK on 12.04 though)

the expiration happened because I didn't get a chance to get back to this because of holiday madness :( most questions have an auto-expire of 15 days, similar to how bugs on Launchpad expire after 60 days. Sorry about that, mea culpa.

I'm trying to get one of my guys with access to our E520 to do the same thing to compare, they're also going to verify that the touchpad and trackpoint both work.

I didn't have python 3 by default, so I installed it via package manager (3.2 to be exact).
Running the script gave me a dependency error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "./driver_info", line 6, in <module>
    from checkbox.parsers.udevadm import UdevadmParser
ImportError: No module named checkbox.parsers.udevadm

Since I don't have Python background, I've spent half an hour Googling on how to get that module, but with no success.
Do you have some advice on how to do that, so I can run this script?

Ugh, sorry about that... you have an older version of checkbox that's also missing the udevadm parser...

the easiest thing to do is just upgrade checkbox to a new version that includes everything you need:

wget http://people.canonical.com/~jlane/checkbox_0.15+bzr1855+201212191018~precise1_amd64.deb

then:

sudo dpkg -i checkbox_0.15+bzr1855+201212191018~precise1_amd64.deb

If you're not running the 64bit version of ubuntu, let me know and I'll get a different package.

Sorry, meant to add that as an info request

I've installed the .deb package (yes, my laptop is 64bit) and the Python script didn't throw an error this time.
The output of the script is:
Device: SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad
Driver: psmouse
Driver Version: 3.2.0-35-generic

If I can provide any additional info, please let me know.

Ok... that's what our system in the lab is running and it works fine...

To test, we use the touchpad test in checkbox, you can run it from cli like so:

/usr/share/checkbox/scripts/touchpad_test left right
echo $?
/usr/share/checkbox/scritps/touchpad_test up down
echo $?

if it detects the movement, it'll highlight the right direction and close once the last swipe is detected.

However, in all honesty, it's sounding like bad hardware to me. The script you ran checks the udev database and determines the touchpad, if seen, driver and driver version. So the OS at least can see the hardware.

This would also indicate that the touchpad is enabled in BIOS, but I guess you COULD double check just to be sure.

One last thing to try:

# sudo rmmod psmouse && sudo modprobe psmouse proto=bare

and see what that does (check dmesg afterwards for messages about psmouse and the trackpad) you should see something similar to the following in dmesg when inserting the module:

[105374.751875] input: PS/2 Generic Mouse as /devices/platform/i8042/serio2/input/input25

beyond that, not much more I can tell you. We tried both 12.04 and 12.10 on our e520 in house with the psmouse driver and it worked at least for simple things like single touch, drag, tap to click and such, I didn't ask about multitouch things like two finger scroll.

$ /usr/share/checkbox/scripts/touchpad_test left right
..popped a window, and I did as the directions said. Nothing seemed detected and it did not close automatically.
$ echo $?
..returned 1

Same goes for:
$ /usr/share/checkbox/scritps/touchpad_test up down
.. it popped a window, didn't react to any movements, and..
$ echo $?
..returned 1

As for BIOS, I thoroughly checked the options and I couldn't find an option for disabling/enabling the touchpad/trackpad.

# sudo rmmod psmouse && sudo modprobe psmouse proto=bare
# dmesg
responded:
[ 8454.550157] input: PS/2 Generic Mouse as /devices/platform/i8042/serio1/input/input10

Fortunately, the laptop is still covered by a warranty, so if it really is a hardware problem, I'll send it to be serviced.

It may well be. As I mentioned before, you're seeing the same basic device and driver info we saw on our system. The reloading of psmouse was a bit of a long shot, it sometimes fixes issues with trackpads that are using the psmouse driver.

As for your latest comment, had that just verifies what we already know, confirming the issue. Had your trackpad been detected and working properly, you would see the touchpad_test window show a green check under each direction when swiped and the tool would have closed on the final swipe.

The best bet for now, beyond asking Lenovo about warranty work, would be to open a bug by opening a terminal and using this command:

ubuntu-bug linux

and try to add as much information as possible, including all of our discussion here. If you do that, could you please link your bug to this question for tracking?

Beyond that, the only other option I can think of would be to try the live CD image and see if the device works in the live environment (try the latest daily for Raring Ringtail, 13.04).