Ubuntu Oneiric 11.10 Touchpad issues

I ran into issues using Ubuntu 11.10 on a Dell XPS 17 (L702x). The touchpad worked during the live USB test drive but stopped after a few seconds post-installation, It seems that the touchpad is not re-enabling itself after typing if you have the 'Disable touchpad while typing' turned on, which is the default by the way.

To fix the issue, simply disable the 'Disable touchpad while typing' setting mouse/touchpad setting.

Another fix for this involves the installation of the 'synaptiks' package. Simply search 'touchpad' in the Ubuntu Software Center. However, I don't recommend that you do this. This is not a package that is needed to control your touchpad. It does not add any extra useful functionality and it drags in a lot of KDE specific QT4 libraries that you would not otherwise need. Instead, my recommendation is that you disable the 'Disable touchpad while typing' option in your touchpad configuration as shown here.

The philosophy that works for me is to keep the installation on your Linux as systems as standard as possible. I avoid getting distribution source from 'edger' PPA's and getting ahead of the distribution as far as possible, preferring to wait for the for fix to arrive, which it always seems to do so within just a short amount of time. After all, this is Linux, ever changing and never finished, and Ubuntu has 2 major releases a year. Quite an accomplishment.