Q: I want my touchpad to be disabled when I use my mouse. How can I do that? touchpad-indicator has stopped working on 11.10. It used to work on 11.04. Gnome3 is not a solution as I don’t like it and find it buggy.
A: Run the following command in a terminal:
xinput list
You will get an output that looks like this:
⎡ Virtual core pointer id=2 [master pointer (3)]
⎜ ↳ Virtual core XTEST pointer id=4 [slave pointer (2)]
⎜ ↳ SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad id=12 [slave pointer (2)]
⎣ Virtual core keyboard id=3 [master keyboard (2)]
↳ Virtual core XTEST keyboard id=5 [slave keyboard (3)]
↳ Power Button id=6 [slave keyboard (3)]
↳ Video Bus id=7 [slave keyboard (3)]
↳ Power Button id=8 [slave keyboard (3)]
↳ Sleep Button id=9 [slave keyboard (3)]
↳ Laptop_Integrated_Webcam_1.3M id=10 [slave keyboard (3)]
↳ AT Translated Set 2 keyboard id=11 [slave keyboard (3)]
↳ Dell WMI hotkeys id=13 [slave keyboard (3)]
It displays all the input devices connected. Note that they all have an id. Since 12 is the id for my touchpad, running the following command will disable it.
xinput set-prop 12 "Device Enabled" 0