Mar

18

If you are a laptop user, you should know how irritating it is when your thumb accidentally brushes the touchpad, which leads to you continuing to type things in entirely a different place. And if you are a laptop user and….a Ubuntu user, you may not know how easy it is to fix this problem! Let’s configure your laptop step by step to disable touchpad temporarily when typing.


1. Preparing Your X11 Configuration

In order to use the configuration program for your touchpad, first you must edit the X11 configuration to add a directive to enable shared memory in the Xserver. The permissions on the X11 configuration are restricted, so you need to make this change using sudo. Back up the configuration file:
sudo cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.old

Then edit the file:
sudo nano /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Once you get the file open, you should see a section pertaining to the touchpad. It may look like this:

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Synaptics Touchpad"
Driver "synaptics"
Option "SendCoreEvents" "true"
Option "Device" "/dev/psaux"
Option "Protocol" "auto-dev"
Option "HorizScrollDelta" "0"
EndSection

You’ll need to add a line in that section of the file (before the EndSection line) with the SHMConfig option set to on (this will allow you to use the GUI client to make changes without restarting the Xorg server). Here is a sample snippet after editing:

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Synaptics Touchpad"
Driver "synaptics"
Option "SendCoreEvents" "true"
Option "Device" "/dev/psaux"
Option "Protocol" "auto-dev"
Option "HorizScrollDelta" "0"
Option “SHMConfig” “on”
EndSectionAt

At this point, save the file and before you go any further, bookmark this blog article you are reading now. Cos you are going to reboot your system. Now you are reboot (or log out, switch to a console with Ctrl-Alt-F1, log in, and run the command sudo /etc/init.d/gdm restart) to load the new X11 configuration.

Assuming that your configuration works, you should now install the configuration program for the touchpad: qsynaptics.

2. Installing qsynaptics

Much like any other software installation, qsynaptics can be installed by using apt-get or aptitude from a terminal:
sudo aptitude install qsynaptics

3. Configuring the Touchpad with QSynaptics

QSynaptics is a graphical program, so it can be run from within the GNOME desktop. To start it, launch a terminal and run:

qsynaptics

The QSynaptics dialog will appear (see image below). The General tab lets you enable or disable the extended features of the Synaptics touchpad driver.

Tapping gestures are configured on the Tapping tab, shown in the following image.

You can disable tapping altogether, insert a tap-disabling delay after any keyboard press, and create tap gestures for one-, two-, or three-finger taps.



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2 Comments so far

  1. oat2sen on March 18, 2008 9:49 am

    I have just tried QSynaptics, it’s much easier than manually configure the touchpad using shell srcipt. very nice discovery, dude!

  2. admin on March 19, 2008 9:27 am

    I used to manually configure touchpad too, but I found that to use QSynaptics is much easier.

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