Disabling trackpad when trackpoint is in use. (Debian-X220)

MANTA · **Posted:** Sat May 14, 2011 10:20 am

I just installed Debian wheezy on my X220 and I noticed how annoying the trackpad is when using the trackpoint as my palm brushes on the pad. Previously I was using Debian on an X300 and simply disabled the trackpad from the BIOS menu, but I am looking for a more flexible solution. When in windows the trackpad is disabled whenever the keyboard of the trackpoint is in use. I was wondering if there is a similar situation for linux.

I have installed gpointing-device-settings but none of the options there worked. I have seen a daemon that that disables the pad when typing, but I don't really have a problem when typing, it is when using the trackpoint that the pad becomes a bother. Does Lenovo have a solution that they use with their preinstalled linux or is there a third party solution for this?

Thanks for the help.

GomJabbar · **Joined:** Tue Jun 07, 2005 6:57 am **Posts:** 9625

If you use the KDE desktop, there is a checkbox for "Input devices" that disables the TrackPad. Gnome does not seem to have the same functionality out of the box.

See if the following is any help: http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Synaptics ... iver_for_X

comps · **Posted:** Sat May 14, 2011 11:29 pm

GomJabbar wrote:

If you use the KDE desktop, there is a checkbox for "Input devices" that disables the TrackPad. Gnome does not seem to have the same functionality out of the box.

See if the following is any help: http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Synaptics ... iver_for_X

The problem isn't in disabling the touchpad manually, that's really easy to do, however it's hard to disable it automatically when the trackpoint is in use (ie. the mouse cursor is being moved by it), which is probably why this topic was created in the first place.

MANTA wrote:

...

Unfortunately, there's probably no easy way, you may take a look at "man 4 synaptics" to see all the options you can use to tune the touchpad, however it's still touchpad-only.

See

Code:

dmesg | grep input:

- that should give you some idea on how to do it. My lines are

Code:

input: SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad as /devices/platform/i8042/serio1/input/input5
input: TPPS/2 IBM TrackPoint as /devices/platform/i8042/serio1/serio2/input/input15

so I list /sys/devices/platform/i8042/serio1/input/input5 to find a directory named "event5" and /sys/devices/platform/i8042/serio1/serio2/input/input15 to find another named "event15". Those names (5/5, 15/15) might differ if you ie. rmmod psmouse and modprobe it again, so don't extract those numbers from the dmesg output.
Now you can "cat /dev/input/event5" to get some output when the touchpad is active and "cat /dev/input/event15" when the trackpoint is active. So now it should be pretty easy to make a userspace daemon read(2) /dev/input/event15 and disable (with some delay) trackpoint if that input line is active (ie. using calls provided by the synaptics driver).

MANTA · **Posted:** Mon May 16, 2011 2:08 pm

Thank for the assistance, I guess there isn't a ready solution out there so if I want one I have to roll one out myself. I guess I will give that a shot.

Thanks for all the help.

gehidore · **Posted:** Sat Nov 17, 2012 9:03 pm

I know this thread is old, It's just the first one I found in my searches.

I too have been irritated with this and since I couldn't manage to find an acpi even for my trackstick on an edge 430 I came up with this script to solve the problem, modify it to suit your needs

Please bear with me since I'm no professional bash scripter.

Code:

#!/bin/bash
#
#Change /dev/input/event13 to your trackstick event
   cat /dev/input/event13 > /tmp/mousemove &
#initialize counter to prevent garbage file from growing
   i="0";
   while true ; do   
      i=$[$i+1];
      #variables   
      oldchecksum=${newchecksum};
      newchecksum=`md5sum /tmp/mousemove | awk '{print $1}'`
      #see if trackpad is already disabled
      if [ "$trackpad" = "off" ]; then

         #compare previous checksum to current if they're same trackstick is not moving
         if [ "$oldchecksum" = "$newchecksum" ]; then
            #make sure trackpad is enabled
            xinput set-prop "SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad" "Device Enabled" 1;
            trackpad="on";
         fi

      else
         
         #compare previous checksum to current if they're different trackstick is moving
         if [ "$oldchecksum" != "$newchecksum" ]; then
            #disable trackpad
            xinput set-prop "SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad" "Device Enabled" 0;
            trackpad="off";
         fi

      fi

      #check for count to keep poll file smaller
      if [ "$i" = "300" ]; then
         echo '' > /tmp/mousemove;
         i="0";
         newchecksum=`md5sum /tmp/mousemove | awk '{print $1}'`
      fi
         #sleep for 1 second so we don't eat up resources
#if you find that the update is not fast enough a smaller number such as .5 might suit you.
         sleep 1;
   done

The only caveat I've found is that if you decide to run 'pkill cat' as root the script will fail to function, also if you kill the script manually without killing cat and restart it you will have multiple cat processes running.

SInce I run fluxbox I've added this script to my ~/.fluxbox/apps with "sudo /path/to/script" as the script will require root access for the mouse event.
Hope this helps someone!

Disabling trackpad when trackpoint is in use. (Debian-X220)

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