Bob La Quey wrote:
Hola Gamaral, KPLUG,
Is there any way to turn off the touch pad on a laptop?
I use a small wireless mouse. The touch pad drives me nuts.
I cannot avoid hitting it at random times while typing ...
This is a show stopper for me. I use KDE on my desk based
machine but I simply cannot use it on my laptop without
turning off the touchpad. GNOME has a dialog that lets me
turn the touchpad off, but so far I cannot find anything in
KDE that will do it.
I would be happy with a command line fix.
Anybody (KPLUG) know how to do this?
You need to disable the touchpad input to X. For example, my laptop has
a Synaptics driver. I disable it explicitly in the /etc/X11/xorg.conf
file by restricting which mouse inputs can be used to drive the X
display. Check your dmesg for a line with something like this:
SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad as /class/input/input3
That will tell you which input to avoid. Your driver might be an Alps
instead.
Then in the xorg.conf file I have:
Section "ServerLayout"
Identifier "Default Layout"
Screen 0 "Screen0" 0 0
InputDevice "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"
InputDevice "Mouse0" "CorePointer"
EndSection
Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Mouse0"
Driver "mouse"
Option "Device" "/dev/input/mouse1"
Option "Protocol" "ImPS/2"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
Option "CorePointer"
EndSection
In my case the /dev/input/mouse1 corresponds to my PS/2 mouse.
Most systems configure the InputDevice section for the mouse to use
/dev/input/mice, which is an aggregated input of all "mice" on the system.
A different way of doing it would be to disable the loading of the
touchpad module. The simplest way is to just move the offending module
out of the way. You could also blacklist it in udev or create an entry
in modprobe.conf something like this:
# prevent synaptics driver from loading
install synaptic /bin/true
will cause /bin/true to run instead of modprobing the module. If you
really need the module to load, you can do it by hand:
# modprobe --ignore-install synaptic
Except now I'm looking at my newer system (kernel-2.6.25.9) and I don't
see a synaptic module, nor an Alps module either. It seems they changed
things on me without me noticing. I'll have to look around to see what
happened. The first method I gave will work.
Gus
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