How to disable/enable touchpad in Ubuntu
Author: admin Posted in June 20, 2008
There is a simple way to disable/enable your laptop’s touchpad in Ubuntu without removing synaptics driver,so when you want to enable your touchpad ,you no need to re-install the driver:
Edit your xorg.conf file: sudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf ,then add a line: Option “SHMConfig” “on” below Section “InputDevice” as below :
Section “InputDevice”
Identifier “Synaptics Touchpad”
Driver “synaptics”
Option “SendCoreEvents” “true”
Option “Device” “/dev/psaux”
Option “Protocol” “auto-dev”
Option “HorizEdgeScroll” “0″
Option “SHMConfig” “on”
SHMConfig on indicates that configuration permission for touchpad ’s parameters has been started,you can already use below commands to control your touchpad:
command：synclient touchpadoff=1 －－disable touchpad
command：synclient touchpadoff=0 －－enable touchpad
hhaa,my touchpad was disabled:
:),my touchpad was enabled again:
July 19th, 2008 at 11:27 pm
Thanks man! Helped for me.
… but I discovered that when you add
Option “SHMConfig” “on”
in xorg.conf
you don’t have to use
command：synclient touchpadoff=…
’cause your laptop’s standart disable touchpad button begin to work automatically. At least that happened with me =)
August 15th, 2008 at 3:45 am
Yes! It worked for me too! The touchpad disable/enable button started to work after a reboot!
Thanks! This works great!
October 14th, 2008 at 2:26 am
I’ve added SMHConfig on to my xorg.conf file. But I keep getting the error message
ben@ben-laptop:/etc/X11$ synclient touchpadoff=1
Can’t access shared memory area. SHMConfig disabled?
Could you help me with this?
October 29th, 2008 at 10:07 pm
Ben, I had the same problem: make sure you are editing the right Section “InputDevice”, in this case, the one with the Identifier “Synaptics Touchpad”.
October 29th, 2008 at 10:44 pm
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December 26th, 2008 at 12:40 am
This worked great! The only catch is that different laptops have different synaptics sections. For my Dell Inspiron B120, it’s:
Section “InputDevice”
Identifier “Synaptics”
Driver “synaptics”
Option “Device” “/dev/input/mice”
Option “Protocol” “auto-dev”
Option “Emulate3Buttons” “yes”
Option “SHMConfig” “on”
EndSection
Then, just use gconf-editor to map the synclient touchpadoff command to your favorite alt-key, and you’re set!