I solved it! The solution is in the code block for those who do not care how I found the solution.
After some googling, I found that for synclient to work, it must use some environment variables set by X. I grabbed the variables using export -p > envars while logged in as a normal user in gnome-terminal. I switched to a regular non-X terminal and logged in as root. I copied the envars file to root's home and then sourced it. For those who do not know what sourcing is look here
http://www.theunixschool.com/2012/04...cing-file.html. I ran synclient, and it worked, but I didn't want to import every environment variable from X into the console, so I went about narrowing down which variables were important. I referred to the ArchWiki article
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Touchpad_Synaptics, and read the example code for "systems with multiple X sessions." They used both XAUTHORITY and DISPLAY. I removed all other environment variables, but those two, and tried the process again. It worked! Finally, I wrote a nice script called touchpad to take care of everything for me.
Code:
#!/bin/bash
declare -x DISPLAY=":0"
declare -x XAUTHORITY="/home/bob/.Xauthority"
if [ $1 = "on" ]
then
synclient TouchpadOff=0
fi
if [ $1 = "off" ]
then
synclient TouchpadOff=1
fi
Now, I can do everything I need to with ./touchpad on or ./touchpad off. Isn't life just wonderful. I hope this will help others in the future.
