* disable trackpad
Posted on August 20th, 2009 by Alex. Filed under Abroad.
Who does not know the problem? You are writing a text and then the touch pad below the space of a laptop is touched accidentally. The cursor jumps to a different place inside the text and in your enthusiasm you do not realize that, writing nonsense. It would be nice to switch on and off the touch pad easily. Some laptops have a built in switch for that, other use settings of a Synaptic touch pad. However, what if you do not have either of them?
Fortunately most touch pads are connected through the old interface PS/2. For those, who are new to the computer world: These are the round connectors for mouse and keyboard on the back of the desktop computer, recently colored in green and violet respectively. An external mouse is usually connected via USB. So what if you can unload the driver for PS/2 making the PS/2 devices (such as the touch pad) stop to work? A hardware without a driver will not work and hence will solve the problem.
In Linux this is quite easy: Open a terminal and type in modprobe -r psmouse as root to unload the driver for most Linux distributions. With modprobe psmouse the driver is loaded again and in about 2 to 5 seconds, the touch pad resumes its work without the necessity to restart the Xserver. If you do not want to load the driver during boot up, add the driver to the blacklisted modules in /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist by adding the line blacklist psmouse anywhere in that file.