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.
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.resetas a GRUB argument.Maybe see if that helps?
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.
If you enter it in at boot time it’s not permanent, so it’ll either work or it won’t, but it shouldn’t break anything.