(Alps Electric Co., Ltd.) is a Japanese manufacturer of electronic components. Their pointing devices include:
The ALPS pointing device driver is a that decodes proprietary touchpad and TrackStick packets over PS/2 or I²C. Its complexity arises from many undocumented protocol variants. On Windows, use OEM drivers; on Linux, the alps.c kernel driver works for most legacy devices. Newer ALPS hardware has moved to standard HID, eliminating the need for a custom driver.
A generic PS/2 driver will misinterpret ALPS packets as erratic mouse movements or fail to detect the device entirely.