by 
As you may know, the Pinebook classic version, 14″, does not have the best keyboard and trackpad in the world. Especially, the space key. That’s why I regularly use external mouse and keyboard instead, except when I’m on the move. In one of the Pinebook post, here, I explained that I didn’t have an external keyboard because I broke the dongle. Guess what, I bought a new one but then face another problem. I bought a mouse/keyboard combo, Logitech K400 Plus, which is alright but not better than MK270 which I had previously. The designers didn’t utilize the space well and produced a cramped keyboard. Additionally, the function keys are disabled by default. But let’s not focus on the Logitech K400 Plus design flaws. Anyhow, I tried this keyboard and mouse combo on any machine and worked perfectly without any problem. But for some weird reasons, I couldn’t get the trackpad working on my Pinebook. So, in this article, I go through fixing Logitech K400 Plus touchpad on Pinebook.
Initially, I tried with two different Linux flavors Manjaro and Armbian using Solaar but the touchpad didn’t work on any of them. The funny thing is, it’s working on my Thinkpad T430 Manjaro-i3 flawlessly.
After doing some research, I came to this realization that maybe some packages are missing in both Manjaro and Armbian on Pinebook that I couldn’t get the touchpad working. With some more googling I found this link from Linux Mint forum.
And yes my suspicion was right. Two packages were missing and that’s why I couldn’t get the touchpad working.
Fixing touchpad of Logitech K400 on Armbian
So to fix that, all I had to do was to install the following two packages using apt-get:
$ sudo apt install xserver-xorg-input-synaptics && sudo apt install xserver-xorg-input-evdevThe above commands work on any Debian or Ubuntu based distributions. For Manjaro the package names may differ. Honestly, I didn’t bother to search.
That’s all for this post, hope you enjoyed it.
Inline/featured images credits
- Guy taping head is Kayode Ewumi from T&K Creative’s Hood Documentary BBC Three
- Logitech K400 Plus image by Logitecth
- Pinebook image on pine64.org
- Man doing practice shooting by LOGAN WEAVER on Unsplash
