On 5/21/24 11:55 AM, J Leslie Turriff via tde-devels wrote:
I'm setting up a laptop machine that doesn't have a BIOS setting for disabling its touchpad. I can run synclient in the user's .bashrc, but that doesn't disable it in the greeter, where one enters one's username and password. Where in the TDE startup sequence can I run synclient to disable the touchpad?
The xinput command also is needed.
Further, some newer laptops such as Thinkpads have "extra buttons." In addition to using xinput and synclient to disable trackpads, these extra buttons need to be disabled too.
In my case with a Thinkpad T580, using xinput list | grep -i 'thinkpad extra buttons' reveals the culprit.
I have a Thinkpad T400 and I only need the basic xinput and synclient commands.
With both laptops I mapped my shell script commands to Fn+F11 to toggle the trackpad.
To integrate the script with TDE, or any desktop environment, I created $HOME/.config/autostart/trackpad-disable.desktop to launch my trackpad-disable script. This automatically disables the trackpad. For just TDE, the $TDEHOME/Autostart likely would suffice. When I want to --rare -- I can use Fn+F11 to enable the trackpad.