Non-op touchpad on Ubuntu

Hi, everybody. First time on the site from the US. I just got an AO ZG5 from somebody on CL. It was working fine when the owner showed it to me and I took it home to charge the batt. He had started a restore (Ubuntu) which was still running as I took it home. Next day turned it on and the touchpad/mouse didn't work. Did a restore of Ubuntu Netbook Remix. Still no touchpad but it works with an external mouse which is fine for testing but won't work for travel. I did the F7 key, no luck. Icon shows touchpad is on. Tried the ALT/F2 shown in some posts but that does nothing on my machine, thinking that's for Windows only? Any ideas? I've been looking for Synaptics drivers with no luck. Thanks in advance for your thoughts. Ed in North Carolina.

 

Ubuntu includes the synaptics driver; it should just work. You could try reinstalling Ubuntu, or, just plug in a USB mouse

 

If it's chock full of specific software that will cost you time or money to replace, maybe it's worth trying to restore. If you want an Ubuntu installation that works reliably, drop the 10.10 Netbook Remix (a very slow and buggy spinoff.)

My trials and errors running off Live USB on this first gen AOA150 say the Desktop Ubuntu 10.10 works best for a load of preinstalled software and user-friendly interface, but Lubuntu is very lightweight and faster. By comparison with either, the performance of 10.10 Netbook Remix was unacceptably slow. If you really like the Remix's "Unity" user interface, you might want to try beta or wait for the new 11.04 Ubuntu, which will apparently use that as default.

By the way, I recommend experimenting with different versions via Live USB (with Persistence to save settings and preferences) as a way to preview different versions easily and a very good acid test of the OS efficiency on a slow USB drive, instead of putting the HDD installation at risk. Then, if I'm all wrong, you go back to your hard drive install.