Dell XPS13 Developer Edition (Haswell) touchpad not recognised by Synaptics Ubuntu 13.10

After installing Ubuntu 13.10 on this laptop I found that the touchpad settings could not be modified from the usual mouse menus, and two fingered scrolling/edge scrolling could not be enabled.

It turns out this is due to the touchscreen driver interfering with the mouse driver, and a workaround is provided here. Just run:

sudo echo blacklist i2c_hid > /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist_i2c_hid.conf

and reboot. This left the touchscreen still functional for me, and the touchpad is now picked up by Synaptics.

Dell XPS13 Developer Edition (Haswell) touchscreen not working in Ubuntu 13.10

After recently purchasing one of these laptops and deciding to update from vanilla Ubuntu 12.04 LTS to 13.10 I found the touchscreen was no longer working.

The solution, happily, turns out to be extremely simple. I updated to Kernel 3.12 from the Ubuntu Kernel PPA.

Download the appropriate deb files for your version of the OS, for me these were:

linux-headers-3.12.6-031206-generic_3.12.6-031206.201312201218_amd64.deb  linux-headers-3.12.6-031206_3.12.6-031206.201312201218_all.deb linux-image-3.12.6-031206-generic_3.12.6-031206.201312201218_amd64.deb

Then navigate in the terminal to the directory these were downloaded to and run:

sudo dpkg -i linux*3.12*.deb

Assuming there were no errors, reboot and you should be set.