Stinkerbelle touchpad

Occassionally the synaptics touchpad is not visible to Ubuntu.

With kernel 3.2.0-30, the trackpad stopped working. It is not detected in dmesg, it is not present in /proc/bus/input/devices, and it is not in xinput --list. Bummer.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SynapticsTouchpad

Also, this is most helpful:

Some general work flow for Triagers

If the features of your Touchpad (like Tapping, Scrolling) do not work at all. In this case, user will not see the Touchpad Tab in System>Administration>Mouse in Main menu. This means that Touchpad is misdetected as PS/2 mouse. Here the following workflow must be followed.

    Check whether Kernel has detected the Touchpad or not by the following.

    cat /proc/bus/input/devices 

        If a Touchpad is detected, then something like following will appear.

            Name="SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad" 
        If Touchpad is not detected then following will appear. In this case the bug must be a kernel issue.

            Name="ImPS/2 Generic Wheel Mouse" 

    Check whether xserver has detected the Touchpad correctly by.

    xinput --list 

        You will see the same name of Touchpad as above. 

    Check whether synaptics module is correctly loaded in xserver or not in.

    cat /var/log/Xorg.0.log | grep -i synaptics 

For problems such as scrolling area, touch area, button wrong mapping, multitouch try investigating with

        evtest /dev/input/eventX
        xev 

Look for name in xinput --list eg - for ↳ TouchPad id=6 [slave pointer (2)], then type

        xinput --list-props 6