External touchpad for Ubuntu?

[Owen Thomas]

On Tue., 22 Dec. 2020, 12:52 am Liam Proven, <lproven at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Mon, 21 Dec 2020 at 09:59, Owen Thomas <owen.paul.thomas at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> > I acknowledge that I'm perhaps being too precious Liam. I need a new
> laptop and, having purchased another Dell (and awaiting its delivery),
>
> Argh! Noooooo! Why didn't you ask?
>

The usual reason: didn't think it relevant at the time.

> I'm looking for a way perhaps to accessorise it and deal with the
> troublesome touchpad without having to remember (forget) a trivial
> configuration detail. I wanted merely to ask if anyone had used an external
> touchpad because I had a grand thought that using an external device might
> be a solution that I will find hard to forget.
>

> I've tried an Apple Magic Trackpad. Worked fine. Didn't disable the
> built-in one automatically, no.
>

Bum! Your advice renders my objective unreachable with an external
touchpad. I did see your point made in other posts too, and hence it would
be remiss of me not to acknowledge this.


> > Perhaps Colin's suggestion is the best that can be done.
>
> ISTM to be an excellent one and to deliver anything that any
> BIOS-based solution could. I don't see why you reject it, TBH.
>

I'm sure the solution is completely effective and will give me precisely
what I want. A couple of questions that come to mind about this solution
are these: First, why do I have to implement this myself? Shouldn't Ubuntu
automatically support touchpad disablement like any other self respecting
OS? Second, some touchpad manufacturers had a disablement feature built
into the touchpad itself - neither the BIOS nor the OS were involved when
the user wanted to turn their touchpad off and back on. Why remove this
feature?

I understand people here might not have an answer to the second question,
but surely the community could address the first?

Goodo.

  Owen.
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