I have a acer travelmate 240 running on debian sarge and I want to disable the touchpad because I work with a USB mouse.
I tried several things and also I searched this forum but I couldn't disable it.
Can anyone of you help me because it is sometimes a bit irritating when you are typing and suddenly you type somewhere in the text where you don't want to type.

Many notebooks have this option in BIOS. Try look there.

It slipt my mind that it is often in the BIOS.

I have looked there but couldn't find an option to disable the touchpad.

I've tried lots of distros (SuSE, Slack, Fedora, Mdk, etc...), but not Debian (Yet.). I understand it's a bit different, but I'm hoping this info will help (it works under Mdk 10.1, Slack 10, and SuSE 9.2)

This is one of many sites that hosts the synaptics touchpad driver: http://web.telia.com/~u89404340/touchpad/

Download, install (./configure, make, make install, etc). You'll then have to edit your xorg.conf file (usually /etc/X11/xorg.conf)
Find the entry for your touchpad, and set the driver value to "synaptics". Add a new option,

Option "SHMConfig" "on"

Then from the console, run

syndaemon -d

This will turn off your touchpad while you're typing, for 2 seconds after your last keystroke. You can change this interval (check the README / man files)

Hope that helps!

Sorry for my late replay.

It had not the effect that I expected but thanks anyway.
I'm realy thinking about switch to an other distro on my laptop, someone that runs lighter and uses less battery power.
so I'm not trying anymore to disable my touchpad on debian sarge.

regards pingue999

Is fn + F7 not working to turn of your keyboard? YOu can always try Pardus Linux, if you want a comlete distro. Just turn of the driver otherwise

On the same model and same OS i used ideas from:
http://www.faqs.org/docs/Linux-mini/...ond-Mouse.html

Now both the tocuhpad and the mouse work together.

My settings, i needed to have in /etc/X11/XF86Config-4:
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Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Configured Mouse"
Driver "mouse"
Option "CorePointer"
Option "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
Option "Protocol" "ImPS/2"
Option "Emulate3Buttons" "true"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Tacpads"
Driver "mouse"
Option "AlwaysCore"
Option "Device" "/dev/psaux"
Option "Protocol" "PS/2"
Option "Emulate3Buttons" "true"
# Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
EndSection


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Section "ServerLayout"
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InputDevice "Configured Mouse"
InputDevice "Tacpads" "AlwaysCore"
EndSection
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