Touchy Touchpad

    It's a long story.....My bf was using something like Ubuntu 10.10 and then I upgraded him to 12.04 in hopes that it would fix his non-functional touchpad on his laptop. Non-functional meaning his left button doesn't work at all it highlights everything automatically . When we upgraded we did it at Free gGeek (FG) and we tried to troubleshoot the mouse with some volunteers but we were not able to get any results. When he uses a usb mouse it also effects the mouse and he can only use the right click successfully (which doesn't get you that far).

    FG suggested getting help at The Hackery and they also had no luck. The best advice we got from them was to change his settings to left handed, so now his left is his right and his right is his left, this is temporary we hope. I asked my roommate what he thought of his distro, Debian and he says he really likes it. I asked because he might be best switching distros (i don't know what else to do :<) After some Google research I came to the conclusion that touchpads have issues with the following distros: Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora & OpenSUSE (and that's probably just the tip of the iceberg).

    However, Mint has better options for touchpads so after reading this link (http://www.gogi.in/touchpad-stops-working-linux-mint-os.html) , I installed Mint 12 (Lisa) on his laptop. After following those directions, his touchpad worked for a little bit, but then went back to old broken self, so it's set to left-handed for now. I was telling my roommate about our troubles and he seems to think it's a debian-based issue so hence why so many distros have the same problems.

      I'm really lost what to do. If you have any suggestions or help to offer it would be much appreciated. :) Thanks for reading.
Genny