Disable synaptics touchpad tap to click in Kubuntu.

[ScottyDelicious]

I have been using Ubuntu and gnome for a while (6.10 - 8.10) and this past week I decided to give KDE a try.

In Ubuntu's Gnome, I select System > Preferences > Mouse, and there is a trackpad configuration GUI. I simply unchecked the option to click with trackpad taps and I was good to go.

In Kubuntu's KDE, there is no GUI config for this (also, there is no GUI config for the trackpad in Fedora 10's Gnome).

Digging around in xorg.conf, I found a very sparse config file. No mention at all about synaptics or input devices. Now I have to dig into HAL fdi XML files (which I will admit, I am not that familiar with yet). Long story short, I had to make a synaptics options fdi.

sudo kate /etc/hal/fdi/policy/11-synaptics-options.fdi

Put this in the file, save it, and log out then back in to restart X.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<deviceinfo version="0.2">
    <device>
     <match key="input.x11_driver" contains="synaptics">
         <merge key="input.x11_options.SHMConfig" type="string">On</merge>
         <merge key="input.x11_options.MaxTapTime" type="string">0</merge>
       </match>
    </device>
</deviceinfo>

I am hoping someone can correct me and show me that there is in fact a gui control to do this in KDE 4.

I feel really comfortable with administering Linux based systems from the command line (more so Debian and Red Hat based systems than others), and I feel right at home in Gnome, but I am cursed with forever having to tinker with my system and learn new ways to do things, so here's to hoping I can get more familiar with KDE ... Just for the fun of learning.

[Bat]

Thank you, Doctor, for that answer. I had to work it out myself on an earlier installation, but I'd forgotten it all by the time I got to this one.

In answer you your plea for a GUI interface: it looks like the sad-sacks who are "maintaining" KDE4 don't care much to have it used by real people, because this is exactly the sort of thing they haven't bothered to port from KDE3 where it worked perfectly well. Is it any wonder Linus Torvalds gave up on them and moved to Gnome? I'm just hoping KDE 4.2 will prove minimally usable; otherwise I'm upgrading my new 8.10 installation to the far superior and better-supported 8.04, where it will stay for a year or two until these guys get some clue.

[elyboy]

I installed kubuntu 9.04 64bit. It seems that a GUI for disabling touchpad is not yet available.

[fatboab]

This issue has been really frustrating me over the last month since I finally totally ditched windows. Thanks for the solution, it worked like a charm.

Cheers,

--
Bob.

[TitanTiger]

Oh, thank the sweet Baby Jesus I found this thread. It worked and now I can type normally.

Thanks for the solution!

[Zorael]

Yeah, there is no KDE4 tool to configure touchpads currently. Perhaps that's worthy of a KDE bugtracker wishlist report.

I think you can install the gsynaptics package and use the GNOME standalone utility, though it's been discontinued. And I'm not sure that's what GNOME is currently using. There used to be a ksynaptics package (and a qsynaptics one), but I think they went missing in Hardy.

From http://qsynaptics.sourceforge.net:

12/01/08 (read: January last year)

TouchFreeze for Linux pre 0.2 and annoucing end of {q/k}synaptics
First the rant, then the grant

You all know that {k,q}synaptics development had been rather slow lately.
I even will stop it completely now, and I will explain you why:

You might have noticed that the latest ksynaptics version does not work any more once again.
As you know your touch pad in X can be accessed if you use the synaptics driver. Since its interface had been subject of change I developed libsynaptics to encapsulate the functionality across different driver versions.
Something happened short time ago and the driver got accepted into the XOrg tree (is that right?).
But now again the interface is changing and nobody cared to update the version numbering the driver reports. Besides there does not seem to be much attention to what would be needed to have a clean interface to access and configure the driver.

Strictly spoken, there's not much I can do about it! So I decided to copy the functionality of TouchFreeze for Windows (a GoS Project) to create something which is much easier to maintain but similary useful nevertheless!
First I tried to use something like Xevie to catch native events but it is both insecure and buggy. Hence, a no-go.
So I finally basically copied the functionality of 'syndaemon' into a Qt4 tray applet which can be used with KDE3/4 and Gnome.

I know it is still a hack, but it took me only a few hours and works for me (Ubuntu, with synaptics driver shm access enabled) which is awesome compared to the ongoing troubles I faced during the maintenance of ksynaptics.

So, please, download it and be happy or even enhance the code, there is still a lot of small improvements to be done...

I'd like to thank all people that helped me during development, it has been fun working with you, and maybe sb wants to grab up the work and integrate it in KDE4 (that would be nice, even platform independence seems possible)

Facts:
# works for me on KUbuntu
# needs /usr/bin/synclient
# needs synaptics driver shm access enabled

Put the binary in your ~/.kde/Autostart or whatever - that should do the trick!

Yeah, and happy new year, of course

Googling around, I find http://gsynaptics.sourceforge.jp.

Announce

GSynaptics will be obsolete. Please try GPointing Device Settings.

There are no packages that match gpoint* in the repositories, though perhaps it's a core GNOME component. With {q,k,g}synaptics discontinued, perhaps that's what it's using now?

See http://blog.fekw.de/2008/09/22/kubun...aptic-touchpad for a guide on how to install touchfreeze.

Alternatively, of course, configure it via HAL or xorg.conf.

[squaregoldfish]

Just as a note for followers of the OP's excellent advice: I found that I had to reboot to get the HAL config change to take effect instead of just restarting X.

Steve.

[nicafyl]

Thank you, gracias. I have read "how to do this" in 10 other places, all of them wrong.

It sucks that there is nothing in the GUI to do this but, at least it is done.

[krazyd]

It's very easy to disable the tap-to-click while typing in KDE4.

Go to System Settings > Advanced > Autostart > Add Program... and enter:

syndaemon -d -t

This will disable your touchpad tap-to-click functionality for 2 seconds after you stop typing and makes my laptop much more usable.

[7x1x]

Adding this to /etc/hal/fdi/policy/11-x11-synaptics.fdi will disable tapping.

<merge key="input.x11_options.TapButton1" type="string">0</merge>
<merge key="input.x11_options.TapButton2" type="string">0</merge>
<merge key="input.x11_options.TapButton3" type="string">0</merge>

TapButton1 is a one finger tap, TapButton2 is a two finger tap, TapButton3 is a three finger tap. Multi finger tapping only works if your hardware supports it.

0 disables tap, 1 is left click, 2 is middle click, 3 is right click.