Disable touchpad in X

G

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?
 
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.
 
Hello, what is the current way to do this for openbox/fluxbox usage please. I'm not using Wayland. I have no BIOS option (using old BIOS) available. I used to do this in Linux with application setting or specific program.

My apologies for replying to an ancient thread, but it's the most directly related subject topic line which fits my question.

Thanks for reading.
 
nicesmeagol said:
Hello, what is the current way to do this for openbox/fluxbox usage please. I'm not using Wayland. I have no BIOS option (using old BIOS) available. I used to do this in Linux with application setting or specific program.

My apologies for replying to an ancient thread, but it's the most directly related subject topic line which fits my question.

Thanks for reading.
Click to expand...
I think you can use sysctl kern.evdev.rcpt_mask but I forgot which number should be.
Or put in /boot/loader.conf hw.psm.synaptics_support="0"
 
Here is a way that I've used on a linux laptop. It checks to see if I have an external mouse plugged in, then does xinput --disable to disable the trackpad and the trackpoint.
Should translate cleanly to FreeBSD. Oh, the string manipulation stuff is Bash-ism
Having it in a shell script means that one can make it an autostart in their windowing environment

logitech=$(/usr/bin/xinput | grep -i Logitech)
if [ -n "$logitech" ] ; then
xstr=$(xinput --list --short | grep -i Synaptics)
ystr=${xstr##*=}
devid=${ystr%%'['*}
/usr/bin/xinput --disable $(($devid))

xstr=$(xinput --list --short | grep -i TrackPoint)
ystr=${xstr##*=}
devid=${ystr%%'['*}
/usr/bin/xinput --disable $(($devid))
fi
 
My reply to this 16 year old thread is this:

libinput debug-events

I would use libinput to figure out device number you want to disable and then create a configuration file to do it.
/usr/local/etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/10-touchpad.conf
 
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I use a ThinkPad x220t and my touchpad is disabled.
Code: 
$ xinput
⎡ Virtual core pointer                        id=2    [master pointer  (3)]
⎜   ↳ Virtual core XTEST pointer                    id=4    [slave  pointer  (2)]
⎜   ↳ System mouse                                  id=7    [slave  pointer  (2)]
⎜   ↳ HP HP Wireless Mouse 220                      id=9    [slave  pointer  (2)]
⎣ Virtual core keyboard                       id=3    [master keyboard (2)]
    ↳ Virtual core XTEST keyboard                     id=5    [slave  keyboard (3)]
    ↳ System keyboard multiplexer                     id=6    [slave  keyboard (3)]
    ↳ Sleep Button                                    id=10   [slave  keyboard (3)]
    ↳ AT keyboard                                     id=11   [slave  keyboard (3)]
    ↳ Tablet ISD-V4 Pen                               id=15   [slave  keyboard (3)]
∼ ThinkPad ACPI Extras                        id=14   [floating slave]
∼ TPPS/2 IBM TrackPoint                       id=13   [floating slave]
∼ SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad                  id=12   [floating slave]
∼ Tablet ISD-V4a

.xinitrc:
Code: 
...
 xinput disable 12
...
 
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