[CentOS] Touchpad doesn't work with C6, kernel-related...

Sun Mar 24 14:29:50 UTC 2013
Marko Vojinovic <vvmarko at gmail.com>

On Sat, 23 Mar 2013 07:24:25 -0700
Akemi Yagi <amyagi at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Mar 23, 2013 at 7:04 AM, Marko Vojinovic <vvmarko at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > I have a Fujitsu Lifebook U series laptop running updated CentOS 6.4
> > (64bit), and the touchpad doesn't work. It's a new laptop, the
> > touchpad works correctly in Fedora 18 Live (given the kernel
> > parameters below), no hardware problems.
> >
> > I searched the web all around, and it's a known issue for several
> > laptop models. The only solution, quoted everywhere, it is to
> > append the
> >
> >   i8042.notimeout i8042.nomux
> >
> > to the kernel parameters. The problem is that the latest CentOS6
> > kernel (2.6.32-358.2.1.el6.x86_64) doesn't appear to recognize
> > these. Or it otherwise ignores them. I did append the parameters,
> > but (unlike in Fedora) the touchpad is still dead.
> 
> Just did a quick check. The current CentOS kernel (centosplus kernel
> as well) seems to have code for i8042.nomux but not i8042.notimeout in
> linux/drivers/input/serio/i8042.c .
> 
> You might want to give ELRepo's kernel-ml a try:
> 
> http://elrepo.org/tiki/kernel-ml
> 
> It is the latest mainline kernel that runs on CentOS.

The mainline kernel works beautifully, thanks! :-)

Now the only question is how does it coexist with the regular kernels?
More precisely, when I do a "yum update", and there are new kernels
available in the update, how will they be ordered
in /boot/grub/grub.conf, and which one will be the default on a
subsequent boot?

I have enabled the elrepo-kernel repository, so both types of kernels
will get updates. However, I want to boot only from the mainline
kernels, never from the regular ones. How should I configure grub
and/or yum, to make this stick?

Thanks again for the advice! :-)

Best, :-)
Marko