How to disable touchpad in lucid lynx

[Bladtman242]

Hi, I don't know how many has had this problem, but I understand I am not the only one

The problem is that after using synclient to disable the touchpad in 10.04 it would enable itself, seemingly, at random.

Well, what I found was that unchecking the "Disable touchpad while typing" feature in "System->Preferences->Mouse->Touchpad" will fix the problem.

Apparently the system does not recognize that the user has deliberately disabled the touchpad. And so it will reenable it when the user is "done typing".


I Hope someone will find this useful

[bobcollard]

Hi, I don't know how many has had this problem, but I understand I am not the only one

The problem is that after using synclient to disable the touchpad in 10.04 it would enable itself, seemingly, at random.

Well, what I found was that unchecking the "Disable touchpad while typing" feature in "System->Preferences->Mouse->Touchpad" will fix the problem.

Apparently the system does not recognize that the user has deliberately disabled the touchpad. And so it will reenable it when the user is "done typing".


I Hope someone will find this useful

Try gpointing-device-settings applet in Synaptic Package Manager. add it to your startup applications and have a choice at restart or bootup.

[nsales1]

This was tremendously helpful! I wanted a way to turn off when the mouse is plugged in, but this is an excellent solution!

[texla]

You have to unclick the "disable touchpad while typing" option in the mouse settings for this fix or the program "touchfreeze" to work

I prefer touchfreeze because it has a nice icon in the corner that makes it easy to disable or enable the touchpad and you can autostart it so it's ready to go. It's in synaptic.

It is strange that typing-disable functions don't really fix the cursor from jumping around a lot when typing for me (in windows either). Would be nice to at least see it disable whenever an external mouse is added for ubuntu. But touchfreeze does the job for me for now....

[Tootler]

Try gpointing-device-settings applet in Synaptic Package Manager. add it to your startup applications and have a choice at restart or bootup.

I tried both this and the gsynaptics applet (they are mutually exclusive) and in both cases the touchpad would re-enabled itself after a time.

Eventually I found that you needed to disable the touch pad in the gconf editor

Select Alt+F2 or open a terminal and Type

gconf-editor

This will open the gconf editor. In the left panel, open up desktop>gnome>peripherals>touchpad. In the right panel uncheck the entry "touchpad_enabled". This will disable the touchpad for you. At least it did for me.

I suspect you may not need gsynaptics or gpointing-device-settings, but I have left them installed just in case.

[Marco7]

Thank you!

I love these counter intuitive little pieces of computer logic.