[clue-tech] laptops turn off touchpad

[Michael J. Hammel]

On Thu, 2009-12-17 at 15:17 -0700, Collins Richey wrote:
> >From time to time this fails to work. The system claims "no Synaptic
> driver loaded", but the touchpad is doing it's usual evil stuff
> interfering with typing.

If the command line isn't working, it's possible to do the same thing
with your X.org configuration file, except that this happens in the
driver configuration at startup time.  This may be preferable to using
the command line tool.

Look at "man synaptics" for how to configure it.  Note that your
xorg.conf may not exist in newer versions of X.org.  These days you only
need to specify parts of the configuration depending on what you're
trying to do.  For configuring (and then disabling) the synaptics you
may want a complete config file.  You can get a starter configuration
with "X -configure" as root, then use that to configure the synaptics
device and disable it.  The location of the xorg.conf file may depend on
your distro, but on Fedora at least it goes under /etc/X11.

Then again, its also possible that the pad is "synaptics-compatible" but
just plain broken.

-- 
Michael J. Hammel <mjhammel at graphics-muse.org>