kogan agora netbook

If you followed the post on this site where I explained how to enable the touchpad on your kogan agora netbook (http://agoranetbook.kayno.net/2009/04/25/oh-my-touchpad-doesnt-work/), you (as well as Josh) have probably found that every time the linux kernel is updated, your touchpad stops working until you add the i8042.nomux option back to your grub menu.lst file.

I have however found a way to solve this, and have just updated my netbook with Ubuntu Netbook Remix to the latest kernel (2.6.28-14) without losing my touchpad. Here is what you need to do:

In your terminal:

sudo gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst

First, remove all instances of i8042.nomux that you have previously added. Now you need to find the line where the kernel options are set – “# kopt=…”. Mine looked something like this:

# kopt=root=UUID=4f3de232-2543-4359-43e2-a2ea36ef4043 ro

And add i8042.nomux to the end of line:

# kopt=root=UUID=4f3de232-2543-4359-43e2-a2ea36ef4043 ro i8042.nomux

Whilst it might be tempting to remove the # from the beginning of the line, don’t – it clearly states in menu.lst: “DO NOT UNCOMMENT THEM, Just edit them to your needs”.

Save and close menu.lst, and finally you need to run the update-grub command. This will take the kernel options (including i8042.nomux) and add them to all the kernel boot lines:

sudo update-grub
Searching for GRUB installation directory ... found: /boot/grub
Searching for default file ... found: /boot/grub/default
Testing for an existing GRUB menu.lst file ... found: /boot/grub/menu.lst
Searching for splash image ... none found, skipping ...
Found kernel: /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.28-14-generic
Found kernel: /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.28-13-generic
Found kernel: /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.28-11-generic
Found kernel: /boot/memtest86+.bin
Updating /boot/grub/menu.lst ... done

If you check /boot/grub/menu.lst now, you will see that i8042.nomux is back as a boot option for each kernel, however it still remains as a default kernel option (on the “# kopt” line). As it is a default kernel option, every time you update your kernel, the option will be added to the boot options for the new kernel.

Now your touchpad should always respond to your finger tips – even after a kernel update!

 

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 2nd, 2009 at 9:30 pm and is filed under agora, agora pro, netbook remix, touchpad, ubuntu. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.