Disabling touchpad on laptop

[Matthew Saltzman]

On Mon, 22 Jan 2007, Dotan Cohen wrote:

> On 22/01/07, Matthew Saltzman <mjs at ces.clemson.edu> wrote:
>> On Mon, 22 Jan 2007, Cameron Simpson wrote:
>> 
>> > On 22Jan2007 04:06, Dotan Cohen <dotancohen at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > | I've got a Dell 6400 / E1505 laptop. The great engineers at Dell put
>> > | the touchpad so close to the keyboard that I'm hitting it every five
>> > | minutes by mistake. Is there and _easy_ way to enable/disable it? Like
>> > | a keyboard shortcut, hardware button, or panel applet (KDE)?
>> >
>> > On ThinkPads I turn this off in the BIOS settings. Maybe you can do this
>> > on your Dell.
>
> That would not work as I must reenable it to mouse around. (What is
> the correct verb in English?)
>
>> You can use the gsynaptics or ksynaptics app to configure the touchpad in
>> GNOME or KDE (assuming it's Synaptics compatible).
>
> Thanks. I installed ksynaptics via yum, but how can I access it?
> Typing ksynaptics at the command line gives me a "command not found"
> error, and I don't see it anywhere in Kcontrol.

I don't use KDE, but I'd assume it makes a menu entry in whatever passes 
for a preferences menu.  That's what gsynaptics does in GNOME.

Here's the touchpad section of my xorg.conf:

Section "InputDevice"
         Identifier  "Synaptics"
         Driver      "synaptics"
         Option      "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
         Option      "Protocol" "auto-dev"
         Option      "Emulate3Buttons" "yes"
         Option      "SHMConfig" "on"
EndSection

The SHMConfig option needs to be set to use the GUI configurators.  From 
the command line, you can also use synclient.  See the man page.

>
>> You might also check out the syndaemon program in the synaptics RPM.  It
>> disables the touchpad when you type, so you don't accidentally thumb it,
>> but you an still use it.
>
> I'll look into that if I can get ksynaptics running, thanks.
>
> Dotan Cohen
>
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>
>

-- 
 		Matthew Saltzman

Clemson University Math Sciences
mjs AT clemson DOT edu
http://www.math.clemson.edu/~mjs