disabling touchpad on laptop

[Garry Williams]

On 11/22/06, François Patte <francois.patte at math-info.univ-paris5.fr> wrote:
> I would like to disable my touchpad mouse on my laptop or, at least, the
> "tap" function of this one.

You want to edit the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file (as root).

The section you are interested in is

    Section "InputDevice"
            Identifier  "Synaptics"
            Driver      "synaptics"

I believe that deleting this entire section should disable the mouse pad.

But, you may want to do what I did and turn off all the fancy
gestures, including the tap but leave the pad active for use without
an external mouse.

See http://web.telia.com/~u89404340/touchpad/ for details.  This
should get you what you seem to want:

    Option MaxTapMove "0"
    Option MaxTapTime "0"
    Option "VertScrollDelta" "0"
    Option "HorizScrollDelta" "0"

The first two turn off the tap function; the last two turn off the
annoying scroll functions.

Another thing that bugged me was the slow speed of the mouse pointer
movement.  On my laptop, it took at least two scrolls across the
entire pad to move the pointer from the left edge to the right edge of
my monitor.  I sped up the movement with these settings.  You might
have to experiment a bit to get it right for your system:

    Option      "MinSpeed" "0.3"
    Option      "MaxSpeed" "0.75"
    Option      "AccelFactor" "0.0300"

After editing the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file, you have to restart X.
Close any applications you might need to save stuff in and then hit
<alt><ctrl>backspace.  This will kill the X session and place you back
in the gdm or kdm login prompt.

Hope this helps.

-- 
Garry Williams +1 678 656-4579