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Ph Sei avatar Ubuntu

Laptop touchpad and keyboard not working in wayland / gdm3

jp flag
Ph Sei

I recently upgraded to ubuntu 21.10 from 20.10 (it was a bit painful because of End Of Life) on my ASUS laptop. After the upgrade, I realised that I could no longer use my keyboard and touchpad in the login screen of GDM3. I needed to plug in an external mous and keyboard to be able to log in. Everything was back to normal once logged in.

I figured out that my normal session is in fact an X session, while GDM3 is running on wayland. I uncommented (removed the #) EnableWayland=false in /etc/gdm3/custom.conf. It solved my issue. Still, I should not have to do this and the touchpad and keyboard should work in wayland, especially that ubuntu is progressively migrating towards wayland.

I also noted that GDM does not give me a choice of sessions any longer, so I had to find out how to know which kind of session I was running via command line to be able to pin down the difference between working touchpad in session and not working touchpad during login.

Edit: to update from 20.10 to 21.10 I was first stuck because of packaging errors (which stemmed, as I found out much later, from sophos-av which denys access to specific dpkg files when not disabled). I first tried to do a 20.10 -> 21.04 -> 21.10 upgrade, but the first did not work because of said errors. I then tried to downgrade to the more ancient LTS release (20.04) by manually editing all the apt-sources files, which obviously did not work. Finally I used a bootable USB to chroot into my system and do the 20.10 -> 21.04 -> 21.10 upgrades, after fixing the errors in my dependencies in 20.10 with multiple apt upgade, apt --fix-missing, etc. iterations, depending on what apt told me to do. These upgrades succeeded. I also got rid of sophos, as they do not provide free updates to the virus database any longer.

To cut a long story short: X recognises my keyboard and touchpad, wayland doesn't. I might have had wayland disabled already in the previous install, but while upgrading I usually prefer the distributor's configuration files rather than mine, especially for more fundamental changes in the system

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matigo
How did you upgrade from 20.10 to 21.10? As there is no direct path at this time, the process that was followed may have resulted in the gaps. Could you [edit] your question to outline the steps you followed?
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Ph Sei avatar
jp flag
Ph Sei
@matigo: ok I did
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