Disable touchpad in X

[gpatrick]

I'm not using the touchpad on my Toshiba laptop but instead am using a USB mouse. The touchpad is very sensitive and sometimes while typing the cursor ends up elsewhere on the page.

I have quite a bit running and don't want to start everything again, so is there a way to disable touchpad without having to add a line to the conf file and restart X, perhaps unloading a kernel module?

[vermaden]

If you use X11 without dbus/hald then you may just stop moused daemon, here is HOWTO for X11 without dbus/hald:
http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=7956

[rhyous]

I have only ever disabled this in the BIOS, never through Xorg.

[vermaden]

@rhyous

... if You have BIOS that allows such options.

[gpatrick]

I used to have OpenSolaris installed and the driver can be unloaded from a running system with modunload or loaded again with modload. One can also disable the driver by placing an exclude in /etc/system.

However, OpenSolaris has become too unstable, and on the laptop I am now using, OpenSolaris and SXCE would turn on the fan which constantly ran at high speed and sounded like it was readying for takeoff. The distribution is also having problems with login/display, drivers, and many other problems so I switched. I had OpenBSD installed and no fan problem, then switched to FreeBSD and again no fan problem. Oracle would be wise to pull the binary license agreements for OpenSolaris and let the project die.

Anyway, I was ultimately hoping there was a way with kldunload/kldload that I could disable/enable the touchpad and also an option for /boot/loader.conf that would disable the touchpad on boot and not do anything via X config.

[vermaden]

@gpatrick

Many touchpads identify them as mouse, so you may just disable mouse modules or compile kernel without them.