Dell touchpad recognized as PS2 mouse

I just want to put this online in case somebody has the same issue.

So here's my setup -- I have a Dell Latitude E6430 laptop. I have arch linux installed on it, and the touchpad was recognized as PS2 mouse, hence multitouch gestures were not working, including two-finger scroll and multitouch tapping.

A friend of mine suggested that this was actually not an elantech touchpad, but an ALPS one (low cost elantech). So a different driver was needed. The package that fixed the issue for me was psmouse-alps-driver from AUR. In case you use a different linux distro, try this url -- from the guys who wrote it. It is a replacement psmouse kernel module, built with dkms.

Commands you might find useful:

dmesg | less

and search for PS2

modprobe -r psmouse

remove old psmouse driver

modprobe psmouse

reinsert psmouse driver (after installation)

dkms status

see status of dkms managed modules

xinput

list X input devices

Update 16 Nov 2012

And everything works flawlessly until you decide to upgrade your kernel. You may imagine what would happen with your custom-compiled kernel driver. Just issue dkms autoinstall to recompile the driver against the current kernel, and then modprobe -r psmouse to remove the old one (if any) and modprobe psmouse to insert the new one.

And thats it! Until you upgrade your kernel ...

If you're using arch linux you can enable the dkms.service: sudo systemctl enable dkms.service, so it would do that for you on reboot.