Touchpad not functioning on Mint EDGE (Framework 16)

Hey folks,

Just received my FW16 today (stoked). I’m hooking up the company I work for with these machines, and the 13inch I set up with my boss has been excellent! Excited to see similar success with this model.

The distro of choice for us is Mint OS, and I saw a general recommendation to use the EDGE OS install for compatibility with modern hardware. So far so good on all items except the touchpad.

During my original install of Mint MATE (before I saw the recommendation for EDGE), the touchpad functioned for a handful of seconds before giving up, and no longer appeared in the mouse settings menu. I saw another had success on fixing the touchpad after installing EDGE ([RESPONDED] Mint on Framework 16? - #21 by TJ_Renninger), but I have not seen similar success. The touchpad is available for configuring in the mouse settings, but no manipulation of options gets it to function.

Stayed with EDGE just to keep with best practices, but I’m at a loss for troubleshooting further. If someone doesn’t mind hand-holding someone who’s not super familiar with Linux, I’d appreciate the assistance!

Kernel version is “6.5.0-28-generic” according to terminal under “uname -r”.

Have you tried re-seating it, and/or tried it in one of the other two positions? That would be my first recommendation, to see if it’s an easily-solved hardware issue.

Haha, I sure did, tried it as soon as I saw the issue!

Went ahead and re-seated it once more for good measure, testing it in different slots, though the right-most position module didn’t seem to fit well.

I’m confident that I’ve seated it correctly, with the keyboard lit and typing, though with the ends of the touchpad and spacer modules not resting at the same height where they meet the keyboard, I wouldn’t be shocked if I’ve set them wrong.

Your kernel is likely too old for it to be affected by what I’m linking, but you may want to check out this thread just in case:

If moving it around doesn’t help, and the kernel thing @RandomRanger suggested isn’t it, then I’d suggest trying a “live USB” of Ubuntu (simply because it’s known to work there and is easy to get, I’m agnostic about Linux distributions). If it doesn’t work with Ubuntu’s live USB either, then it’s definitely a hardware problem.

In that case, all I can suggest is talking to Framework’s support team. They might have other potential solutions to try, and if all else fails, can send you a warranty replacement. As I understand it, they’ll send you the new part, and then you send the old one back after you receive the new one, so you’ll still be able to experiment while you’re waiting.

Thanks for the support so far, folks, but I think I just had a miraculous recovery!

Last night, I left the computer on (on accident) with the charge cable out, so I came in today with it fully drained. I imagine it had the opportunity to drain the CMOS battery and flush some sort of cache… bc now it works! Unsure what happened…

But just to leave a paper trail for any others experiencing the issue- Fresh install of Mint EDGE, and a full drain of the battery? (Probably CMOS)

Huh. I thought about suggesting that (resetting the motherboard by disconnecting the battery, as I’ve done with other problems), but thought this one sounded like it really was a hardware problem. I’ll keep that in mind for future problems, thanks for letting us know.