Disabling the Touchpad when Typing in Linux
I was letting my daughter type away on my laptop today. She's only 3 so it
pretty much consists of randomly pressing keys to make "stuff" happen on the
screen. I noticed that she was tapping the touchpad frequently and causing all
kind of crazy things to happen on the screen. Now, I'm pretty good about
keeping away from the touchpad when I type, but for her sake I decided to find
out
how to disable the touchpad while typing on Linux. In my case, Kubuntu.
Refer to the article linked above for the full deal. In short it is:
- Add Option "SHMConfig" "on" to the InputDevice section for your
Synaptics Touchpad in your xorg.conf file.
- Make sure that syndaemon -i 1 -d runs on login.
The guide at
Ubuntu
Geek is obviously Gnome centric but for me I just made a small script
calling the syndaemon command in ~/.kde/Autostart and it runs just fine. You,
of course, must chmod +x the script before it will run. I did run into one odd
thing though. Apparently KDE won't run the script unless you put #!/bin/bash
as the first line. Without that line it simply opens up the file in an editor
every time to log in. No biggy, but odd.
What this does then is disabled the touchpad completely while you are typing
and waits for one seconds after you stop typing to turn it back on. Why this
option isn't a check box in some KDE dialog I'm not sure.