External touchpad for Ubuntu?

[Volker Wysk]

Hi!

Am Montag, den 21.12.2020, 00:45 +1100 schrieb Owen Thomas:
> I have a laptop computer, and, as I have explained many times before now,
> it annoys me no end that I cannot disable my touchpad.
> 
> I have heard people say that I should just plug a mouse in, but I don't
> want to buy myself a mouse just so I can disable my touchpad. But I do
> think that I could buy myself an "external touchpad". I have my laptop on
> my lap, and I think that if I plug in an external touchpad, and rest it on
> the arm of my chair, this setup might just work.
> 
> I did a quick search, and found while these devices do exist, I found only
> a few references where people have wanted to use an external touchpad in
> Ubuntu, and nothing useful about which vendors might sell a reliable
> external touchpad (one that would disable the laptop's touchpad when in
> use and have the same or a similar set of gestures as the internal one)
> with a recent release of Ubuntu. I hope there's something.

On my laptop, I use this command in my ~/.bashrc to turn off the touchpad:

if [ "$DISPLAY" == ":0" ]; then
    xinput --disable "AlpsPS/2 ALPS GlidePoint"
fi

You might be able to knit something. Find out the device name of your
touchpad. xinput will tell you, when I remember correctly. Then use the same
command as above, with the name of your device included. 

You'll probably want to turn your touchpad on and off with a key
combination. This can be done in Gnome: assign a key combination to a
command. Although I haven't done this yet, myself.

When I plug in (the radio receiver of) my cordless mouse with the laptop, it
doesn't turn off the touchpad. It possibly wouldn't too, if you pluged in an
external touchpad.

Good luck!
Volker
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