How to disable the touchpad ?

[vld_apo]

Hi, I would like to disable the touchpad on my laptop occasionally, since it is very sensitive... and I would like that to be default feature when I open Ubuntu

[lugoteehalt]

For a Synaptics touch pad there is syndaemon which turns off the touch pad for a few seconds when the keyboard is being used. Suit your purposes? It's probably already installed.

Start it with syndaemon -d -r or something in .xsession or .xinitrc; don't use exec.

[H'fd]

Try this (Ubuntu):
First make a backup of this very critical file.

sudo cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.bak

then...

sudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Look for these lines:

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Synaptics Touchpad"
Driver "synaptics"
Option "SendCoreEvents" "true"
Option "Device" "/dev/psaux"
Option "Protocol" "auto-dev"
Option "HorizScrollDelta" "0"
EndSection

Comment-out this entire section by inserting octoplexes (#) like this:

# Section "InputDevice"
# Identifier "Synaptics Touchpad"
# Driver "synaptics"
# Option "SendCoreEvents" "true"
# Option "Device" "/dev/psaux"
# Option "Protocol" "auto-dev"
# Option "HorizScrollDelta" "0"
# EndSection

Save the file. In case of trouble, restore the backup.