Acer Nitro AN515-42 Touchpad solution

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As you may have heard, Acer, in all its otherwise wisdom, removed the BIOS parameter to switch the touchpad to its basic mode. Therefore touchpad fails to work in Linux now out of the box.

To get the touchpad working with the new linux variations, you would need to add:

i8042.reset i8042.nomux i8042.nopnp i8042.noloop

to your GRUB configuration file. So that for example, it looks like this:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="resume=UUID=1d1e38xx-cca7-4b39-8e21-633f1ce334c1 rhgb i8042.reset i8042.nomux i8042.nopnp i8042.noloop"

For Fedora and I suspect all Redhat derivatives, you would need to add this to the end of GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX parameter in /etc/default/grub

Then you need to re-create the grub configuration file. I recommend the following handy script for this – it has automatic detection for UEFI/EFI formats. Put it in, say, /usr/local/bin, save it as grub2-regen and make it executable with
chmod +x /usr/local/bin/grub2-regen

Then launch grub2-regen as root.

#!/bin/bash
# Author: Eric Zhiqiang Ma (http://www.ericzma.com)
# How to use this script:
# http://www.systutorials.com/136638/how-to-regenerate-grub2-config-file-on-linux/
if [ -d /sys/firmware/efi ]; then
    grubcfg="/etc/grub2-efi.cfg"
else
    grubcfg="/etc/grub2.cfg"
fi
echo generating $grubcfg
# make a backup just in case
cp $grubcfg $grubcfg-grub2-regen-cfg.bak
# regenerate the config file now
grub2-mkconfig -o $grubcfg
echo "Regenerated grub2 config" 
echo $grubcfg

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