Disable Synaptics Touchpad

original article:

http://ubuntu.wordpress.com/2006/03/24/disable-synaptics-touchpad/

March 24, 2006

Posted by ubuntonista in ubuntu, guides. trackback

I needed a quick way to disable and enable my synaptics touchpad at will, and I found one.

Make sure that in you /etc/X11/xorg.conf file, you have:

Section "InputDevice"
       Identifier      "Synaptics Touchpad"
       Driver          "synaptics"
       Option          "SendCoreEvents"        "true"
       Option          "Device"                "/dev/psaux"
       Option          "Protocol"              "auto-dev"
       Option          "HorizScrollDelta"      "0"
       Option          "SHMConfig"             "on"
EndSection
 

Notice the Option “SHMConfig” “on” line — that is the one that you really need to have in there. This allows you to change some configuration parameters for the synaptics touchpad without restarting Xorg (Xserver).

Now that is taken care of.

All you have to do to disable your synaptics touchpad is to execute the command:
$synclient TouchpadOff=1

and to turn it back on, you can execute the command
$synclient TouchpadOff=0

TIP: To make it even easier to turn the touchpad on and off, you can set a keyboard shortcut and bind the shortcuts to the command to turn it on, and off, and use the keyboard shortcuts.