[ Thanks to Falko
Timme for this link. ]
“Hello all, hopefully this brief how-to will help
others, this issue has been bugging me for years. I want the same
capability in Fedora that exists in most recent versions of Windows
— disable the touchpad on my laptop if an external mouse is
plugged in. Note that my how-to is a little hardware-specific
regarding the actual disabling of the touchpad; I’ll discuss that
more at the end of the guide.“So, here goes:
“For my OS (Fedora 13 x86_64) and hardware (Dell Precision
M4500) – I needed a specific utility and three scripts. This Dell’s
trackpad and nipple-stick are seen as an ‘internal’ PS/2 mouse by
Fedora, so I had to install ‘xinput’ to disable it (and use a very
arcane little command-line).# yum -y install xorg-x11-apps
“The enable/disable commands may be different for different
hardware … I had to use some xinput commands to figure out the
values I needed:”