Mouse/touchpad toggle in Ubuntu

Question

How to tune Ubuntu to automatically deactivate a touchpad on mouse connect and activate on its disconnect?

Answer 1

You can manually disable an input device via:

xinput set-int-prop "B16_b_02 USB-PS/2 Optical Mouse" 'Device Enabled' 8 0

and reenable it via:

xinput set-int-prop "B16_b_02 USB-PS/2 Optical Mouse" 'Device Enabled' 8 1

You can get the list of device names via:

xinput list

If you want to automate the whole process you could write a script to listen to HAL, which will tell you when devices are plugged in or removed. As a starting point you can have a look at xboxdrv-daemon.py

Answer 2

Have you seen this thread? Looks like they're almost there.

Answer 3

I use the following command in the Awesome startup script:

lsusb | egrep -i 'Mouse' > /dev/null && synclient TouchpadOff=1 || synclient TouchpadOff=0

Answer 4

I have an old Compaq Armada 110, and just installed Ubuntu.

I have connected a PS/2 mouse, which the system cannot see. On the other hand it can see the touchpand as a PS/2 vitual mouse.

Can i change this so that i could only use the PS/2 mouse and not the touchpad ?