# Crazy trackpad on my laptop



## drupol (Apr 8, 2021)

I'm using FreeBSD 12.2-STABLE on my old laptop (HP EliteBook 820 G1). In overall, everything is working fine.

My WM is I3, suspend/wake-up works well, all good. It does its job.

The laptop has a trackpoint, a trackpad and 4 buttons as you can see here.

The trackpad has a weird behavior. It works fine the first couple of minutes I started X Window, and then, for some reasons that I can't figure out, it goes crazy.
By crazy, I mean that as soon as I touch the trackpad, the mouse goes randomly everywhere on the screen and do some random clicks as well.
Basically, the trackpad is unusable and I can only use the trackpoint.

What can I do to try to fix that?

Thanks!


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## chrbr (Apr 8, 2021)

Do you have anything related to xkbset(1) at startup, for example in a .xinirc? If yes, settings can expire depending on the configuration. Then please look for "expire" in the man page.


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## drupol (Apr 17, 2021)

No, my .xinitrc is:

`exec ssh-agent dbus-launch --csh-syntax --exit-with-session i3`

This thing is getting me crazy!


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## Crivens (Apr 17, 2021)

What about moused, if that is still a thing? What does .xsession-errors or dmesg say to this?


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## drupol (Apr 17, 2021)

I just disabled moused and it seems that so far it's working fine. I'll let you know within a few days if this has fixed the issue.

Thanks!


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## drupol (Apr 19, 2021)

Crivens said:


> What about moused, if that is still a thing? What does .xsession-errors or dmesg say to this?


It just did it again 

I was browsing in firefox when it started. I don't know where to look for log, it seems that there is nothing relevant about this.

The moused service is disabled as you said, so I guess this is not the issue.

It's very hard to debug such issue that appears randomly 

Any other clue?


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## Crivens (Apr 19, 2021)

Maybe oxidized contacts?


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## drupol (Apr 19, 2021)

No, no ... the laptop is almost brand new and it happens quite randomly. Sometimes I can use the trackpad for an hour, sometimes for 2 minutes.

What else should I check?

Could it be something with libinput and xorg ?


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## drupol (Apr 24, 2021)

I found this article: https://askubuntu.com/questions/894679/ubuntu-touchpad-issues-mouse-pointer-jumps-around

Then I removed the package: x*f86-input-synaptics-1.9.1_8 *and restarted.

After restarting things were the same... and after a couple of minutes, the bug appeared again, but this time, I found something in the log: */var/log/Xorg.0.log*, find it attached.

The relevant part is in the bottom of the file:

`[ 71047.026] (EE) event5  - SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad: kernel bug: Touch jump detected and discarded.

See https://wayland.freedesktop.org/libinput/doc/1.16.4/touchpad-jumping-cursors.html for details`


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## JonnytheRipper (Jun 7, 2021)

I have the same laptop which had the exact same issue with its trackpad.

I used Ubuntu 14.04 back then. And after several minutes of trackpad use the mouse pointer would go bonkers. I tried a few things (which I don't remember anymore) to solve the issue but none of them really worked.
As I also had Win7 on this machine I was able to confirm that this trackpad issue was also happening there while using all the recommended drivers from the HP homepage.

Finally, I was quite sure that this might be a hardware issue and opened a warranty case with HP. They picked up the laptop swapped the trackpad and I never had any problem with my EliteBook 820 G1 afterwards. In fact it still is my daily driver (although, I never used any BSD on it ).

I'm afraid your issue might not be solvable in software.


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