Touchpad problem with Asus laptop on Linux

There it was, my new ASUS X550LD laptop with blah RAM blah blah HDD etc etc. Free Dos was pre-installed on it as the only OS. Using unetbootin I converted my pen drive bootable with Ubuntu 14.04. And Bam! My touchpad wasn’t working.
When you find your hardware faulty on the very first day, you need to be bothered. Having about half an hour research on Google (obviously on some other device), I found that Ubuntu still doesn’t support that model of Asus or vice-versa, I don’t know.

I started relying on external mouse. But, as my faulty touchpad device was still on, I couldn’t use the pointer properly. For example the clicks were not valid sometimes, or you point to some directory but suddenly the pointer jumped to some other place like electron performing transitions in atom.

With more research then I found this command xinput. It lists all of the connected devices and give them id numbers.

As it shows PS/2 Generic Mouse my touchpad as id=3. I can run this command to turn this device off so that it stops interfering with my external mouse.

xinput set-prop 13 "Device Enabled" 0

or

xinput disable 13

So, I relied on this hack for about 6 months and then I found something which gave me huge relief!

Open /etc/default/grub with editing permissions.
Then find the line

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=”quiet splash”
and replace it with
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=”quiet splash psmouse.proto=bare”

Then perform sudo update-grub in the terminal. And then reboot ( sudo reboot just in case of not having to removing hands from keypad).

That’s it. I am now able to use my touchpad on linux.

Cheers!