Enabling the TrackPoint on a ThinkPad X1 Carbon 5th under Ubuntu Linux 16.04

The ThinkPad X1 Carbon 5th couldn’t use its TrackPoint under Linux at all. Plenty of people were discussing the problem, but nobody had actually fixed it.

Then a while back, with the X280 and X1 Carbon 6th entering internal testing, the issue finally got some attention, and it got solved.

First thing to note: the ThinkPad X1 Carbon 5th ships with one of two TrackPoint/touchpad combos, either ALPS or Elantech. If you’ve got the former, you can just follow the Arch Linux wiki and be done with it. Mine’s the latter, so I needed another approach.

Start by upgrading your kernel to 4.13:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:canonical-kernel-team/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt install linux-generic-hwe-16.04-edge

Then blacklist the i2c_801 module:

sudo vim /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf

Uncomment the line that blacklists i2c_801.

After a reboot, you’ll find both the touchpad and the TrackPoint work.

P.S.: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1723986 https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/forums/v3_1/forumtopicpage/board-id/Special_Interest_Linux/highlight/true/page/23/thread-id/9645