My laptop has a touchpad and there's no way to switch the trackpad on and off via the hardware.

So to avoid random, possibly destructive palm-swipes, I set up xorg.conf so that the trackpad was off when my usb mouse was present. In slackware 11 I achieved this with:

and pointing the /dev/mouse symlink to /dev/input/mouse0, which was the USB mouse, if connected, or, if not, the trackpad. Hence no need to ever edit xorg.conf. Lovely

In slackware 12.1 this no longer works as the trackpad is always mouse1 and usb mouse is always mouse2. mouse0 isn't anything (there's no ps2 socket?). I can see why this makes sense - perhaps my slack 11 method was a bit of kludge really.

So at present I've got to remember to edit xorg.conf or use layouts depending whether my USB mouse is connected or not. Is there a better way that would get me back to what I had in slack 11?

even better...

udev is a way of managing linux devices accessed via /dev filesystem. it incorporates rules and simple progmatic decision making to create /dev/xxx files. you can use this to create /dev files that are different depending on whether your mouse is connected or not, and its all automatic once you have set it up. no editing thereafter!


simply create a udev rule (/etc/udev/rules.d) to setup the symlinks in the /dev dir when you mouse is connected (or not).

http://reactivated.net/writing_udev_rules.html

of course, if you are not using udev then install and use it

thanks keratos - udev is indeed the way to go.

I installed the synaptics driver from slackbuilds.org and followed the instructions/READMEs carefully.

Then I created /etc/udev/rules.d/90-local.rules with these rules:

I found them here:
http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/...max?page=0%2C1

And now plugging in the usb mouse switches off the trackpad and vice-versa.

Very happy

Just hit an annoyance: if I start my laptop up from scratch with the usb mouse plugged in then the trackpad still works. I have to either do synclient TouchpadOff=1 manually or unplug and plug the mouse.

well done.

so far as booting with mouse plugged in, I think you need to change the way you run your rule. ADD/REMOVE is an event, I am not convinced these events are triggered unless a change of state occurs. i.e. if you boot up with a device, the event is only triggered once you remove a device, or plug it in. this behavior is what you are seeing.

rather than ADD/REMOVE try some logic like ...

<enable the touchpad by default at system start>
<IF mouse device loaded THEN>
<disable touchpad>
<ENDIF>

there are many ways to start touchpad at system start, if not already done so.

it is possible to use the following to disable touchpad if a mouse driver is loaded

KERNEL=="mouse0", RUN+="/usr/bin/synclient TouchpadOff=1"

note that mouse0 may be different on your system. to confirm if mouse0 is your interface to the mouse, then try

# udevinfo -a -p /sys/class/input/mouse0

udev and the kernel communicate via something called 'sysfs' or /sys to you+me. All devices managed by udev can be interrogated by using appropriate interfaces under /sys

so, you should get something like


looking at device '/class/input/input0/mouse0':
KERNEL=="mouse0"
SUBSYSTEM=="input"
DRIVER==""
ATTR{dev}=="13:32"

looking at parent device '/class/input/input0':
KERNELS=="input0"
SUBSYSTEMS=="input"
DRIVERS==""
ATTRS{name}=="Macintosh mouse button emulation"
ATTRS{phys}==""
ATTRS{uniq}==""
ATTRS{modalias}=="input:b0017v0001p0001e0100-e0,1,2,k110,111,112,r0,1,amlsfw"

if not, try other devices under /sys/class/input/* until you find it.

check out the KERNEL== line. this should be put into the udev rule as above.

this should be better than ADD/REMOVE