My little Dell mini has, as do all my laptops, a Synaptics TouchPad. I hate touch pads; I find them difficult to control, hard to click, and generally to be a real PITA. I prefer to use a Targus mini-USB mouse for pointing and clicking. The Targus mouse works well, but the touch pad is enabled, and I find myself constantly rubbing across the pad, sending my cursor to where the woodbine twineth. This causes a noticeable degradation of my usual good humor.
In days past, I’d hack up /etc/X11/xorg.conf, and add “SHMConfig” “on” to the Synaptics device section, restart X, and type
synclient TouchPadOff=1
This disabled the touchpad, and life and my humor were good. Fedora 10 Beta ships without xorg.conf; hal and evdev do an admirable job of making X just work without xorg.conf and associated arcana.
So, to get SHMConfig set under the new scheme of things, create /etc/hal/fdi/policy/shmconfig.fdi, with these contents:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<deviceinfo version="0.2">
<device>
<match key="input.x11_driver" string="synaptics">
<merge key="input.x11_options.SHMConfig" type="string">true</merge>
</match>
</device>
</deviceinfo>
Restart your X server, and type
synclient TouchPadOff=1, or use gsynaptics, a GUI tool. Check the box “Disable Touchpad.”
No more touchpad.
-k-
Update [12/02/2008]: This is nearly the most popular post ever at my humble blog. I found the inspiration, and a lot more Synaptics info here, and was remiss in not including it in the original post. My giddiness at its solving my problem in no way justifies my not giving credit where credit is due. Credit now noted, and given.
Also, if you cut and paste the above, some extraneous, invisible characters may show up in the pasted output. Your text editor of choice should help here.
Finally, in the comments, it was noted that SELinux should be disabled. I don’t think that’s necessarily the case; SELinux was disabled on my system when I enabled the above; I’ve since re-enabled SELinux, relabelled the disk, and all is well.
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6 Comments
I don’t mind touchpads, but I do hate the tap-to-click they do by default. I always turn that off, but keep the other functionality.
In my upgrade from Kubuntu 8.04 to 8.10 beta last week, I found the same issue with xorg.conf not being the correct place for these settings any more. I solved it by editing /etc/X11/xsessionrc and adding
xinput set-int-prop “AlpsPS/2 ALPS GlidePoint” “Synaptics Tap Move” 32 0
Thanks for the info. I can’t stand tap-to-click and this was driving me nuts.
It’s worth noting that SHMConfig didn’t work for me until I disabled SELinux (I usually do it first thing after a fresh Fedora install, but hadn’t gotten around to it this time).
Cliff:
I disabled SELinux as well, though in my case, it was because it was interfering with NetworkManager. So, SEL was definitely off when I did the above steps.
PJ:
Thanks for the Kubuntu info. I was just getting used to where everything was, and now, they’re shuffling it around. I’ll keep your hint in the toolbox as well.
-k-
Thx for the useful info about how to disable the Synaptics touchpad. It was driving me crazy to see my cursor jumping from left to right and back. Would be interesting to be able to disable the touchpad as soon as the sytem detects a USB mouse, just as in Windows.
Executing ‘fixfiles -R hal restore’ takes care of selinux.
Thanks for this very useful information. Would you be able to tell me how to in fact speed up the synaptic touchpad in my delld800 in FC10? I like using the touchpad, unlike you guys (yes, I’m weird), but it’s just too slow.