Disable the touchpad permanently, or just when you plug-in a mouse. Phil Bull philbull@gmail.com 2009 GNOME Documentation Project Creative Commons Share Alike 3.0 Turning-off the touchpad

To disable the touchpad:

Click SystemPreferencesMouse and select the Touchpad tab.

Uncheck Enable touchpad. The touchpad will be turned-off immediately.

If the touchpad is your only pointing device and you accidentally turned it off, you can turn it back on again using just the keyboard.

Press AltF2, type gconftool --set /desktop/gnome/peripherals/mouse/touchpad_enabled -t bool True and press Enter.

Disable the touchpad when a mouse is plugged-in Phil Bull

This section needs fixing-up to provide useful advice. It's basically working around a feature request bug.

There is currently no simple way of having your touchpad automatically disabled when a mouse is plugged in.

gconftool --set /desktop/gnome/peripherals/mouse/touchpad_enabled -t bool True gconftool --set /desktop/gnome/peripherals/mouse/touchpad_enabled -t bool False ENV{ID_CLASS}="mouse", ACTION=="add", RUN+="synclient touchpadoff=1" ENV{ID_CLASS}="mouse", ACTION=="remove", RUN+="synclient touchpadoff=0"