I’ve had a lot of luck fixing my various Linux related problems by stumbling into various blogs and personal websites. Rather than just take and take, it seems only fair that I start giving back when I figure out a solution to a problem.
I just updated to Fedora Core 5, and found most everything works OK. The one problem that really vexed me was shutting off the Synaptics touchpad. I can’t stand trying to type something, only to drag my thumb across the touchpad and totally screw up my work. gsynaptics worked in FC4, but I couldn’t get it to work in FC5.
The Ubuntu blog over at wordpress.com plus a number of forum posts got me to where I needed to be. While I still don’t have gsynaptics working, there is a way to turn the touchpad off from the command line.
Use the command:
synclient -l
That brings up all of the current settings for the Synaptics TouchPad driver. One option should be TouchpadOff. If the touchpad is currently working, then it should list among the options
TouchpadOff =0
For disabling the touchpad, enter the following at the command line:
synclient TouchpadOff=1
The touchpad is now off, and you can type without dragging the cursor around all willy nilly.
Turn it back on with
synclient TouchpadOff=0
This way you can temporarily disable and enable the pad without messing around with your xorg.conf.
2 responses so far ↓
1 Ubuntu User // Jun 17, 2006 at 3:45 pm
Hey, Thanks for the kind comments about the article. Hope you enjoy visiting my blog.
2 Chickity China » Turning off synaptic driver in FC6 // Nov 3, 2006 at 3:28 pm
[...] line in the xorg.conf file isn’t enough to get synclient, gsynaptics, or ksynaptics working in FC6, even though that was enough for FC5. Now you need to be sure both of these lines are in your xorg.conf: [...]