Dell 15z Touchpad

intruderii · #1 5th August 2011, 04:49 AM

I'm having difficulty getting Fedora 15 working with my Dell XPS 15z touchpad. It's a multi-touch Cypress touchpad which apparently has no available Linux drivers. Is there any way to get this working or must I wait until some official drivers are made?

I'm willing to work through potential solutions!

bbfuller · #2 5th August 2011, 10:10 PM

Hello intruderii

Welcome to the forum.

I found this:

http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/inde...t-1776254.html

on the Ubuntu forum where someone reckons to have got it going. Look for the posts from July 5th onward.

I don't know how/if that will translate to Fedora though, and I doubt if it does more than activate the basic functions.

intruderii · #3 6th August 2011, 06:29 AM

That thread says I need to modify the psmouse module. But, unfotunately that module doesn't seem to exist in Fedora.

Code:

sudo rmmod psmouse
ERROR: Module psmouse does not exist in /proc/modules.

mattold7 · #4 7th August 2011, 11:45 PM

I am also interested in this let me know if you find out something

David Batson · #5 8th August 2011, 12:56 AM

AFAICT, it appears that psmouse is part of the kernel now.
What happens if you just enter: sudo modprobe psmouse proto=imps

Just an idea. Try installing mtdev (multitouch device). Maybe reboot and see what happens.
http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.linu...el.input/19182

intruderii · #6 8th August 2011, 01:48 AM

Thanks David,

Unfortunately neither of those suggestions worked. sudo modprobe psmouse proto=imps seems to execute, but it doesn't return anything and the mouse still remains immovable. Installing and rebooting with mtdev also had no effect.

mattold7 · #7 11th August 2011, 01:13 AM

Any other suggestions?

mattold7 · #8 3rd November 2011, 04:13 AM

Has anyone had any success with this?

murat01 · #9 17th December 2011, 12:23 AM

you need to download and build a custom version of the kernel, with psmouse configured as a module. Then, loading psmouse with proto=imps activates the touchpad. I found the touchpad, however, extremely sensitive, sensitive to the point of frustration: the touchpad picks up an induced signal from a finger, which IS NOT touching the pad, but is just close enough to it.

premudriy · #10 19th December 2011, 02:18 AM

Hello, guys! I have the exact same Dell XPS 15z and struggled a lot trying to solve all the quirks with this laptop. At this point I solved all of the major problems. So, here it comes:

1) To make touchpad working all you need to do is add "psmouse.proto=exps" to the kernel options. For now I just added it at the end of the line starting with "linux /vmlinuz......" in /boot/grub2/grub.cfg

This makes touchpad work, but only in "basic" mode, i.e. no multi-touch. The scrolling on the right side dragging works too.

NOTE: Remember that modifying /boot/grub2/grub.cfg is not permanent and will be overwritten when kernel updates. I'm new to Grub 2 and have to read how to make changes that stick though kernel upgrades, but for now modifying that file at least makes things work.

2) Since Fedora 15 I was noticing that my laptop gets extremely hot and fan runs on high all the time. I found this happens because CPU frequency scaling governor does not load. Therefore CPU always sits at highest frequency. Furthermore, the PowerBoost does work in Fedora which results in CPU constantly running at whooping 3.4GHz.

I have traced this problem to the following: if option "acpi=off" is present in kernel boot options, then CPU is not recognized properly (shows only 1 core). Also, a whole bunch of other acpi-related things don't work like battery charge, suspend, etc.

BUT, if I was to remove "acpi=off" from the kernel options the Fedora would not boot. Then I noticed that removing "acpi=off" and adding "noacpi" instead made things mostly work except the keyboard didn't work (big bummer).

So, after more tinkering I have found the solution that worked:
- simply remove "acpi=off" (and/or "noacpi") from kernel boot option (same file as in 1) and add only "pci=noacpi".

Now my XPS works cool and quiet.

3) Finally, some people can't get WiFi to work no matter what in this 15z, even though the iwl6000b2g driver is installed. I have noticed that the hardware switch to toggle WiFi in Fedora doesn't work, i.e. you can't turn on WiFi with Fn+F2. Therefore, you must boot to windows to turn on the WiFi with Fn+F2. In other words you must make sure that wireless hardware is on before you boot fedora, otherwise even after doing "rfkill unblock all" the "rfkill list" will still show that wireless card is hard-blocked.

I hope this helps!

EDIT: PS: I have noticed that original poster inquired about F15. I am now on F16 with latest updates to date and all the tweaks work. I didn't try these teaks in F15. I just waited though F15 without doing anything, hoping that these issues will be remedied, but they didn't, so I started looking into it myself.

Also, one more quirk about Dell XPS 15z: if you disable "Virtualization Tech" in BIOS, then you will not be able to install Fedora no matter what, it will say something like "...kernel is corrupt and can't load..." or similar. Just a thing to watch out for.