<attempt 2, fat-fingered send> Hi Randy, On 3/18/22 01:32, Randy Dunlap wrote: > Hi all, > > I have a Dell Inspiron 15 5510 laptop. Of course, it has a touchpad > (which I think of as a nuisance pad). > I would like to be able to disable the touchpad easily. > > Are there any best practices or suggestions for how to do this? > (I am using xfce4 as the desktop environment if that matters.) > > > Sometimes the touchpad is discovered as a PS/2 Generic Mouse on > the i8042 AUX port, and sometimes it is discovered as this > touchpad: "DELL0B24:00 04F3:3147 Touchpad" on some I2C device: > "i2c-DELL0B24:00". (The different discoveries might have something > to do with my kernel configuration/builds, but I don't know that > for sure.) > > I have some very hackish scripts that I can run to toggle the > 'inhibited' flag in sysfs (/sys/class/input/ for the I2C device or > or /sys/devices/platform/i8042/ for the i8042 AUX port device), > but that requires root (sudo), so that does not qualify as "easily" > IMO. > > E.g., > $ sudo toggle-aux-mouse > or > $ sudo toggle-i2c-touchpad > > depending on which configuration the device is in. The touchpad is supposed to be always recognized as, well a touchpad, so you want it to show up as "DELL0B24:00 04F3:3147 Touchpad", as you said this likely depends on your kernel config. And then usually the desktop environment will give you an option to disable it. At least GNOME offers a clear on/off toggle see e.g. : https://blog.separateconcerns.com/img/gnome-touchpad-settings.jpg Or you could use xinput properties to set the matching xinput device, to disabled which you can do by device-name: https://linuxhint.com/change_mouse_touchpad_settings_xinput_linux/ And then change the "Device Enabled" property. Regardless of the method, the kernel's responsibility here is to make sure the touchpad gets seen as a touchpad and after that "disabling" it is a userspace problem. Regards, Hans
