No touchpad multitouch on ASUS Chromebook CX9 (DROBIT)

Bug Reports
1

I’ve actually figured out a temporary/local fix for this, but I’m posting here in the hopes that someone can upstream the fix, and/or in the hope that my solution will be helpful to someone else.

TLDR; add this to /etc/libinput/local-overrides.quirks:

[ELAN Touchpad]
MatchName=*ELAN*Touchpad*
AttrResolutionHint=31x31
AttrPressureRange=10:8

And then reboot.

Per the title I’ve got an ASUS Chromebook CX9 (DROBIT). I installed MrChromebox’s firmware without issue, and then installed Debian 12. The touchpad only sort of worked at first; I could drag the mouse around and single-click on things, but it felt laggy/poorly calibrated and multi-touch gestures like “2-finger click for right-click” or “2-finger drag to scroll” weren’t working.

I googled around and someone mentioned that they solved a similar problem by adding a libinput “quirk”. I looked through my system and found that both Asus and Elan (the touchpad manufacturer, I think) have quirks already defined, but they weren’t being applied because my touchpad device name didn’t match the patterns they were using. The fix above is a copy of one of the Elan quirk definitions, but with an updated MatchName to match my hardware.

When I run libinput list-devices I see (among other things) this device name:

Device:           ELAN2701:00 04F3:31C6 Touchpad
Kernel:           /dev/input/event8

Before applying the fix, running libinput quirks list /dev/input/event8 showed no quirks, afterwards it shows this as expected:

AttrPressureRange=10:8
AttrResolutionHint=31x31

I won’t pretend to understand what those lines mean, but I can confirm that “2-finger click to right-click” and “2-finger drag to scroll” now work for me. And moving the mouse feels a lot smoother now too.

I hope this is helpful to someone! If there’s any more info I can provide, please let me know!

2 Likes
2

Thank you so much. Been looking for a solution for this for ages. I made an account here just to thank you.

3

went through the trouble of creating an account in this forum just to say THANK YOU !!! i wasted three hours of my life with claude and chatGPT trying to fix the issue and ultimately it was the old school way that yielded results (combing forums for people with the same issue lol).

if anyone else who doesn’t know what the fk they are doing comes by this thread for this reason, i had to modify OP’s nano file to my own trackpad’s name, which you can find via sudo libinput list-devices

op will you take my hand in marriage