Disable touchpad without KDE
 

I am installing Slackware 11.0 on my old Compaq K6 laptop right now. I'm installing everything except KDE and am going to install kernel 2.6.17.13. I don't like my touchpad so I plug in an external imps2 mouse. How would I disable the touchpad when the external mouse is plugged in?

You might be able to change the device in xorg.conf from "/dev/input/mice" to "/dev/input/mouse0" or "/dev/input/mouse1" depending on which one is the mouse and which one is the touchpad. You can use "cat /dev/input/mouse?" with the ? replaced with the number of the device you're testing, then use the device to see if you get output.

The problem with this is that the device nodes don't necessarily stay the same, so you might be out of luck. I'm sure there's a way to do this with udev, though...

Does your notebook not have a button that disables the touchpad?

my xorg.conf points to a mouse/touchpad in /dev/mouse which is a sym link t/dev/psaux. cat /dev/input/mouse1 or cat /dev/input/mouse0 says no such device. /dev/psaux is the pointer...touchpad or external mouse. Maybe I should try another kernel on my Slack 11 cds? I'm using kernel 2.4.33.3 and the scsi.s kernel....I've had trouble getting the 2.6 kernels to boot on this old Compaq Presario 1270 laptop.

linuxhippy,

I think the easiest way to set it up is the use mouseconfig tool and save the changes in a new xorg.conf under a different name.

Did you know that you can have more than one xorg.conf file and tell startx to use one or the other? This will let you have a configuration for when you want to use the external mouse and another for when you need to use the touchpad. Here's how you'd call a different config file with startx.

Dennisk

My laptop works with both usb mouse and touchpad at the same time, if I wanted to disable the touchpad, I would find out which module was loaded for it and add rmmod module to the rc.local script.

samac

Some laptops see the touchpad and external mouse as the "same" mouse. In those cases, there's not much you can do at all because both appear as the same PS/2 device.

Module Size Used by Not tainted
usb-storage 63520 0
usb-ohci 18856 0 (unused)
usbcore 56812 1 [usb-storage usb-ohci]
orinoco_cs 4116 1
orinoco 31188 0 [orinoco_cs]
hermes 6244 0 [orinoco_cs orinoco]
ds 6612 1 [orinoco_cs]
yenta_socket 10532 1
pcmcia_core 39460 0 [orinoco_cs ds yenta_socket]
ide-scsi 9392 0
agpgart 45092 0 (unused)
apm 9292 2


This sounds like a good idea. Which module from lsmod is my mouse? Maybe yenta_socket is both external mouse and tablet combined?

Is that all the modules that are loaded, it seems light.

yenta_socket is required by pcmcia.
orinoco is wireless devices.
usb_storage external usb drives/stick/camera
apm power management
etc.

My touchpad is run by usbhid, but that also runs the mouse, however I could have also used synaptics-usb as the driver, but I couldn't be bothered modifying the kernel.

If this doesn't help you could look at the similar threads link at the bottom of the page.

samac

I've written a Python script that allows the user to turn Synaptics TouchPad off or on from the desktop. Wrote it for a friend who is using Ubuntu and has a Toshiba laptop. He found it very annoying that when the TouchPad was on, his cursor would sometimes jump around the screen from time to time. He wanted the ability to easily turn it off and just use his usb mouse, but also to easily turn it back on if he wanted to. The main command was being done from a terminal and this script places a GUI window on the desktop to make it easier to use for the non-CLI types.

This is my FIRST Python script, so it's offered AS IS - NO GUARANTEES IT WILL WORK PROPERLY - USE AT YOUR OWN RISK. If you are interested in beta testing it, find it here in my blog:

http://www.w-3productions.com/cvcs/w...l_touchpa.html

I'd very much appreciate hearing back in this thread how it works for you. And if there's any Python programmer who wants to improve on the script - and I'm sure it can be improved upon, as this is my first script and I know very little about Python - please do and post an improved version back in this thread!

If this script blows up your computer, let me know so I can quickly remove it from my blog. :-)

Cheers.