Hi: This is a portable computer with keyboard and touchpad. Accidentally touching the touchpad while typing can induce bizarre effects. Some touchpads have a little hole on a corner which is a sensor tapping which you enable/disable it. I have an Acer Aspire One Cloudbook 14 where the whole is missing. Does that mean there is no mechanism at all for transitorilly disabling the touchpad?

First look in bios maybe.
Guess it would depend on how the device attaches first before we guess too much more.

If bios is of no help and you can describe this connection you can usually disable the connection or the driver it uses.

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I've taken a look at the driver settings and no gesture seems to be available to disable it. Added to the lack of a hole, I think the manufactures trusted on the user selecting a large response time to inhibit undesired effects. I have just disabled the driver. Hope I can manage with the keyboard alone to, for instance, write a post. A BIOS setting would be more of a permanent thing. If want, as I am writing now to see other parts of this page I logically woun't go to the BIOS.

It seems to be using the Synaptics client. So:
I leave it up to you to guess how to enable it again.

jlinkels

When I first started playing with Linux on a laptop, the only option was as jlinkels posted below, But; now-a-days, depending on your distro there are settings in the control center.

In Linux Mint 18.x for instance, in the Control Center >> Hardware >> Mouse >> Mouse Preferences >> Touchpad tab is a checkbox; Enable touchpad. This turned out to be one of my favorite controls.

The only problems with this method are that it is buried so deep and I do not always remember to turn the touchpad back on when I run out with the laptop without a mouse.

Depending on the desktop environment, there may be an option for disabling the touchpad while typing. This works for devices that are handled by libinput as touchpads, but excludes some touchpads handled only as 'generic pointer' devices. However, here's a recent thread where I demonstrated how any pointing device can be disabled while typing via a simple script that can run at login (as an autostart script):
https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...5/#post5807829

Better than outright disabling of the touchpad device (unless you really dislike using them at all)

this is what I use. if you do not have an input settings in whatever WM/DT you are using. mine WindowMaker, Fluxbox, Openbox etc. is where I use this. It should work in others as well in a script called on startup or when ever you call it, or justin your cli.
for me depending on which Linux I am running, it's 12 or 13 so I just keep both of them in there as I do cp my autostart between systems to cut down on typing.
the zero 0 is off, to turn it back on use 1 the & is to set it in the back ground, it needs xinput to work. Just type in 'xinput' in cli to get your set-prop code

All right. Then that's all.