# Turn touchpad on / off via key ?

## seppelrockt

I have a Dell Inspiron 6000 Notebook and since I use a USB mouse I'd like to switch the touchpad off from within KDE - or even better with a keybord shortcut. I hate it to exedantely move the cursor while typing some lines. This function is not hard wired via BIOS on this laptop. 

The only way to archive this is to edit xorg.conf and restart X - but that's not a real solution of cause. My question is whether one can change this X setting "live" (as one can change resolution) or maybe there is a user space program for this. I guess kernel stuff might not help here - right?

Did anybody do somethingf like this ever?

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## dtor

Have you looked into this one (if you like gkrellm):

http://perso.wanadoo.es/r_mano/vaio/gksyn.html

It will disable the touchpad while you are typing.

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## seppelrockt

Thanks for the great tip and sorry for the delay - no, I'm not a gkrellm user but the whole thing is based on syndaemon which is part of the synaptics package ... <tacking a breath> ... which I have allready installed since I use a synaptics touchpad. It even has a (not working) init script in /etc/init.d installed for me with portage without telling me  :Wink: 

The syndaemon works fine for me when inwoked as user from the comand line from within a running X. But thats the problem for the init script: it fails complaining about "Can't open display". How can I fix this? Or should I write it into my xinitrc without any init script?

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## seppelrockt

OK, as a workaround I have put this lines into ~/.xprofile:

```
syndaemon -i  0.7 -d
```

This works but I would prefer a clean "solution" via init script. If anybody has an idea how to fix the init script, this would be great.

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## juniper

i would *love* to have the touchpad disabled when the usb mouse is plugged in.

j

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## seppelrockt

 *juniper wrote:*   

> i would *love* to have the touchpad disabled when the usb mouse is plugged in.

 

I read something about this in /usr/share/doc/synaptics/ directory - there comes a script with synaptics which disables the touchpad when a mouse is plugged. You just have to dig a little in the synaptics docs in the path given above and I'm sure you will find the explanation for the script.

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