Touchpad not working on CentOS 8

Question

The title says it all. I just installed CentOS 8 on my laptop and the touchpad isn't working. Like many, I hate the touchpad but for times like when I'm on an airplane there often isn't room for a mouse.

Speaking of a mouse, my USB mouse works just fine... just don't have the same luck with the touchpad. I tried running

synclient -l

and got

command not found...

So I ran

yum search synaptics

and got

No matches found.

So I ran

less /proc/bus/input/devices | grep -i touch

N: Name="ELAN1300:00 04F3:3057 Touchpad"

A ha! Perhaps we are on to something here.

So I ran the following five commands and didn't get any output:

lspci | grep -i elan
lspci | grep -i touch
lsusb | grep -i elan
lsusb | grep -i touch
lsmod | grep -i elan

Are there any other commands I should run which would shed some light on what is going on?

When I Google "elan touchpad linux driver" I cannot find squat. Is there a fix and/or a driver/package/etc., out there for this device?

Answer 1

let's start with something easy, first, try to find what provides 'synclient' with:

dnf whatprovides synclient

as this will allow you to install what possibly may be needed, like the following:

xorg-x11-drv-synaptics-1.9.0-2.el7.x86_64 : Xorg X11 Synaptics touchpad input
                                          : driver
Repo         : base
Corrispondenza found in:
File name   : /usr/bin/synclient

Next, you need to check what is your Xorg environment is telling you and there may be some issues.

Try to find out the log file, possibly in '/var/log/' as this will tell you if there are errors by looking form '(EE)' within the file 'Xorg.0.log'.

For hardware issues, I suggest you 'lshw' command or 'lspci'/'lsusb'.