HowTo: Disable Synaptics Touchpad While Typing

[sgosnell]

Replace it with gedit, nano, or whatever your favorite text editor may be.

[schlort]

woops, i'll edit to make that more clear.. just habit i guess.

[johnnylavah]

Purpose: For many of us, our laptop touchpads get in the way of our typing quite often and can actually cause us to highlight or minimize things we didn't intend. So, this will help to alleviate that by making a small delay in the response of the touchpad after typing.

NOTE: Please read this guide entirely before attempting to do it. There is a section where you must restart X and thus close down your internet browser. The best way to do this would be to print this guide! I hope this works as well for you as it has for me!

Procedure:
1. Turn on SHMCONFIG
A. Open a Terminal. Applications -> Accessories -> Terminal
B. Type sudo cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf_synbackup

C. Type gksudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf Enter your password if it prompts you.

Note: The second command in the picture is typed wrong. Please see C.

D. Search for a section that looks like this:

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Synaptics Touchpad"
...
End Section

E. Add a line above the End Section line and put this into it:

Option "SHMConfig" "on"

F. Save the file and close gedit and the terminal window
G. Write these commands down just in case this screws up your window system: sudo cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf_synbackup /etc/X11/xorg.conf and sudo killall gdm and sudo gdm
H. This next step will restart your window system, so save any work and close any open applications. Press: Ctrl-Alt-Backspace. This should take you back to your login screen. If it does not, press Ctrl-Alt-F1 and login at the terminal window. After logging in, type the commands that you wrote down from step F in order hitting return after each command.
I. If your login screen came up the first time, continue on to part 2, if not, look over waht you did carefully and see if you can spot any mistakes.

2. Add the Startup Command
A. Open the sessions manager: System -> Preferences -> Sessions
B. Click the far right tab labeled Startup Programs
C. Click the Add button
D. Type in the following: syndaemon -i 1 -d

E. Hit ok then hit close

Congratualations, you are done! Note that this will not take effect until Gnome is restarted or you type the command from 2D in a terminal window. You can restart Gnome with the Ctrl-Alt-Backspace trick (make sure to save everything first!) or you can open a terminal by going to Applications -> Accessories -> Terminal.

If you have any questions, comments, or concerns, feel free to contact me through this board, or more easily through email or AIM.

this is working perfectly for me in ubuntu 9.04!

thank you very much!

[sgosnell]

Ummm... 9.10 won't be released for 6 months. 9.04 was just released this week.

[johnnylavah]

Ummm... 9.10 won't be released for 6 months. 9.04 was just released this week.

you are correct...typo on my part

[andre_orwell]

After editing my xorg.conf I found my display resolution (which is a little "new" at 1280x800) was not detected correctly. This, combined with a lot of posts out and about suggesting that xorg.conf may be falling from favour as a way of configuring X got me digging. I found that settings for my synaptics trackpad could be set in /etc/hal/fdi/policy/11-x11-synaptics.fdi

which looks like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<deviceinfo version="0.2">
 <device>
   <match key="info.capabilities" contains="input.touchpad">
       <merge key="input.x11_driver" type="string">synaptics</merge>
       <merge key="input.x11_options.SHMConfig" type="string">On</merge>
       <merge key="input.x11_options.EmulateTwoFingerMinZ" type="string">190</merge>
       <merge key="input.x11_options.VertTwoFingerScroll" type="string">1</merge>
...
   </match>
 </device>
</deviceinfo>

which enables SHMConfig and sets up vertical two finger scrolling.

This got me wondering if there was a way to configure this particular option (tapping off while typing) via this file - thus keeping all the configuration information in one place! Anybody know?

Anybody care to suggest if this is a "better"way to configure the track-pad settings (better than xorg.conf).

Thanks

[sgosnell]

I use touchfreeze. It's in the repositories, and it works for me.

[majikins]

Nice one - was using the old method in this post to solve this annoying problem but have tried your tip on touchfreeze and it works for me too. Painless!

Thanks

[meravblum]

can somebody please help me? i cant open synaptics because when i do, i get this message:
Failed to run /usr/sbin/synaptic as user root.

The underlying authorization mechanism (sudo) does not allow you to run this program. Contact the system administrator.

im quite a bigginer and am really stuck.

[sgosnell]

You may have your sudoers file either corrupted or missing. Can you run anything else using sudo?

How are you trying to run Synaptic? From the menus or from the command line? If from the System/Administration menu, it should run if you put in the correct password when prompted.