Re: Dell laptop touchpad disabling?

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: