Disable touch pad when typing

[eggbert]

Is there any way to disable the touch pad on my laptop while I'm typing? This is driving me crazy.

If I look in the "Input devices" settings, on the touch pad options there seems to be no way to disable while typing. However, I see that there's a program called "Synaptiks" which does include the option, but it crashes every time my laptop resumes from sleep.

What is the difference between Synaptiks, and the touch pad settings in the kde control center? They both look pretty much the same except for the option to disable while typing.

[SteveRiley]

The package kde-config-touchpad supplies the synaptiks utility. When installed, this program's UI creates two pages. One page is "Touchpad Configuration," which is the same thing you see in System Settings | Input Devices | Touchpad. The other page is "Touchpad Management," which includes the additional settings for switching touchpads on and off.

Do you, perchance, have the Xorg-Edgers PPA installed? If so, that's probably the cause of your crashes. That PPA includes an updated touchpad driver. The maintainer of the driver has begun removing sections of code that are of questionable quality and not well-supported (see this and the 17 messages that follow in the thread). Unfortunately, the Synaptiks utility calls some of these sections directly, and their absence causes the utility to crash.

I discovered this a few days ago and reported it in Launchpad bug 1002736. Robert Hooker created a PPA with a modified Synaptiks, but it didn't fully fix the problem.

For now, I've reverted to the earier xserver-xorg-input-synaptics driver, so that Synaptiks will work correctly: I rely on the disable-while-typing feature, too. You can force APT to downgrade with:

sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-input-synaptics=1.6.0-0ubuntu1~precise1

And then, to prevent it from being updated during your next dist-upgrade, place a hold on the package:

sudo apt-mark hold xserver-xorg-input-synaptics

[eggbert]

Do you, perchance, have the Xorg-Edgers PPA installed?

Nope I do not have this PPA installed. It's actually a fresh install of kubuntu. The synaptiks utility works fine and will disable the touchpad, except that it crashes every time on resume, but I do not understand the purpose of synaptiks, why isn't it all just in the standard KDE input devices settings to begin with, and why the missing "disable touch pad while typing" checkbox?

[SteveRiley]

Well, I don't suspend/resume my laptop, so I'm not aware of any specific details regarding that particular problem.

Without kde-config-touchpad, there is no Synaptiks utility, and the KCM included with KDE includes only the touchpad configuration controls you see in System Settings. The Synaptics utility adds the additional touchpad management controls that dynamically handle switching the touchpad on or off. You can install Synaptiks (which is primarily a collection of Python scripts, from what I can tell) by hand from .tar.gz files on KDE-Apps.org, or you can install the kde-config-touchpad package, which includes an automated installer for Synaptiks. On a standard Kubuntu install, kde-config-touchpad is included by default -- that's why you're seeing it on a fresh install.

[SecretCode]

I have synaptiks, via kde-config-touchpad, and the option you are looking for works fine. It reports a crash sometimes / quite often when I resume from sleep - and I click the button to restart it - I can live with that.

[Snowhog]

I couldn't live without synaptiks. For me, I have it configured to disable the touchpad when a mouse is plugged in.

[SteveRiley]

Well, the new touchpad driver that's slated for the next version of Xorg will break Synaptiks. So please vote for my bug, to raise its attention.