Trackpad Disabled After Sleep/Suspend Following Upgrade to Ubuntu 20.04

As you may have guessed by my previous article, I recently upgraded to Ubuntu 20.04. Since the upgrade, I’ve had an issue where my laptop’s trackpad is disabled until I reboot–which is very annoying.

Today I set out to tackle the problem and found that this has been a recurring problem since at least 16.04, and it actually seems more surprising that I haven’t seen the issue until now! Luckily, there’s an easy solution.

I’m using a T440s, and this article about fixing the trackpad on a T450s was perfect. In this article, I’ll walk through my steps for confirming and fixing the issue.

First, I wanted to assert that I could reproduce the problem by performing the following steps:

1. Reboot
2. Confirm trackpad works
3. Close laptop lid
4. Open laptop lid
5. Confirm trackpad is no longer working

Next, per the referenced article, I ran the following two commands to verify that they would re-enable a disabled trackpad:

$ sudo modprobe -r psmouse
$ sudo modprobe psmouse

Yay it worked! So, now I could put the permanent solution into place. I modified /etc/default/grub so that the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT property included psmouse.synaptics_intertouch=0, then ran update-grub. These two tasks can be accomplished by running the following:

$ sudo sed -i 's/GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="\(.*\)"/GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="\1 psmouse.synaptics_intertouch=0"/g' /etc/default/grub
$ sudo update-grub

That’s it! I rebooted, repeated my repro steps, and confirmed that the trackpad was no longer disabled. Wonderful!