Comment 14 for bug 641320

I have a new sony vaio F12M1E and had the same problem, right from the first boot of 10.10 from the installation cd.
Neither was working my display after I installed the nvidia driver, but that is another story (finally solved it by reverting to driver 256.53 instead of the newest one).

I got the touchpad recognized by following the instructions from this website:
http://www.thibautwdowiak.com/blog/index.php/77-install-of-ubuntu-1004-lucid-lynx-on-a-sony-vaio-vpcs12v5e.html

I'm *not sure what the solution does*, but here it is:

gksudo gedit /etc/default/grub

set the grub default to the following instead of "quiet splash"
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="nomodeset i8042.nopnp"

Then again in the terminal
sudo update-grub

and reboot