Trackpad Disabled After Sleep/Suspend Following Upgrade to Ubuntu 20.04

Adam Prescott
2 min readMay 7, 2020

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…

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