Workaround for Ksynaptics. (Was preventing people from making a mistake)

[Gene Heskett]

On Sunday 07 December 2008, Kevin Kofler wrote:
>Linuxguy123 wrote:
>> You obviously have NO understanding of how frustrating it is to use a
>> laptop and have the cursor jump to the wrong position about 30x per day
>> to make this statement.
>>
>> You have ZERO user empathy which is pretty darn scary considering you
>> seem to be on the Fedora developer team. I highly suggest that you examine
>> your behavior on this list.
>
>I was not the one who made the decision to turn off SHMConfig by default,
>nor am I the ksynaptics maintainer (who is the person responsible for
>keeping it up to date with current versions of the synaptics driver). Don't
>shoot the messenger.
>
>And I have a laptop with a touchpad myself, I almost always use it with an
>attached USB mouse and I never felt the need to disable the touchpad. (I
>did disable tapping, because that annoys me even when I actually use the
>touchpad, and I posted clear instructions for how to do that.)
>
>        Kevin Kofler

So do I Kevin, and a readily available method of shutting the touchpad off, 
preferably forever, should be part of all installs.  I don't know how many 
times I have posted and looked like a blithering idiot because my post made 
no sense.  I do my best to keep my thumbs away from that SOB, even using a 
finger to tap the space bar when I'm composing an email, only to have it do 
something off the wall cuz a finger or thumb got too close to it.  It may 
just take a notion to highlight all the message I'm working on, and then 
delete it with the next keypress.  Or it may decide to focus switch me from 
window 8 where I usually run the email agent, to window 3 and what I type for 
2 or 3 seconds becomes a shell command.  That has in fact has caused 2 
complete reinstalls on that machine cuz I had no idea what it may have done 
other than some things no longer worked.

Its a very unpleasant experience at best.  It might be a toleratable situation 
if it actually had to be tapped, but the one I have in an HP dv5120us, only 
needs a wave in its general direction.  When I had F6 on it, synaptics in my 
rc.local could disable it, but someone, in their infinite wisdom, apparently 
took synaptics out of the later repo's, which IMO converts a perfectly 
capable laptop with a radio based usb mouse into an absolute damned nightmare 
to try and use in a productive manner.  When its dvd writer failed, I asked 
the tech if he could unplug it since I used a separate mouse, but the CC 
firedog dummy, in addition to using a junk screwdriver to open mine and 
replace the dvd, had to admit he didn't know how to do that.  Unreal.

With synaptics running to disable it, the machine is a productive machine, 
without it, my vocabulary of unprintable words is very rapidly refreshed.

-- 
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
"Old age and treachery will beat youth and skill every time."
-- a coffee cup