Re: Dell laptop touchpad disabling?

[Hans de Goede <hdegoede@redhat.com>]

Hi Randy,

On 3/18/22 01:32, Randy Dunlap wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I have a Dell Inspiron 15 5510 laptop. Of course, it has a touchpad
> (which I think of as a nuisance pad).
> I would like to be able to disable the touchpad easily.
> 
> Are there any best practices or suggestions for how to do this?
> (I am using xfce4 as the desktop environment if that matters.)
> 
> 
> Sometimes the touchpad is discovered as a PS/2 Generic Mouse on
> the i8042 AUX port, and sometimes it is discovered as this
> touchpad: "DELL0B24:00 04F3:3147 Touchpad" on some I2C device:
> "i2c-DELL0B24:00". (The different discoveries might have something
> to do with my kernel configuration/builds, but I don't know that
> for sure.)
> 
> I have some very hackish scripts that I can run to toggle the
> 'inhibited' flag in sysfs (/sys/class/input/ for the I2C device or
> or /sys/devices/platform/i8042/ for the i8042 AUX port device),
> but that requires root (sudo), so that does not qualify as "easily"
> IMO.
> 
> E.g.,
> $ sudo toggle-aux-mouse
> or
> $ sudo toggle-i2c-touchpad
> 
> depending on which configuration the device is in.

The touchpad is supposed to be always recognized as, well a touchpad,
so you want it to show up as "DELL0B24:00 04F3:3147 Touchpad", as
you said this likely depends on your kernel config.

And then usually the desktop environment will give you an option
to disable it. At least GNOME offers a clear on/off toggle see: