x11: howto disable rogue touchpad?

[Polytropon]

On Tue, 29 Sep 2015 06:22:17 +0200, O. Hartmann wrote:
> Typing, for instance, a text for a report, with hands layed down on the
> chassis, turns into a horror: while typing, suddenly you get close enough to
> the touch thing and suddenly the carret jumps randomly into another portion of
> the text. That happens in editors running in X11/windowmaker or any other WM I
> tried so far. 

That's unacceptable for normal use.



> As polytropon stated earlier, just disabling PS/2 was one of my first thoughts,
> so I disabled support in the kernel. But since the Lenovo's keyboard is also(!)
> PS/2 (not USB), I lost keyboard, too.

You can remove "psm" (PS/2 mouse) support independently from "kbd" (AT
and PS/2 keyboard) support if you create a customized kernel. Just
don't build (or at least don't load) any module that would give access
to the PS/2 mouse. The keyboard, coming from "atkbd", should still
work, just that "dmesg" doesn't show any PS/2 mouse ports anymore.

The USB mouse (and USB keyboard) use "ukbd" and "ums" drivers. They
are handled "more dynamically" than the "plain old" devices and are
therefore harder to disable. :-(



> A while ago, I also tried some recommendations I digged from the net - without
> success. I think I still mess up with the HAL support and the weird, mostly
> not-well documented way to enable/disable/configure devices, device support in
> its XML synatax.

You should be able to get rid of HAL because it's deprecated now. Even
X builds without HAL support per default, so no problem here ("autodetect
magic" gone wild). Creating a somehow "static" configuration for X is
usually no problem on a laptop where hardware doesn't change on a daily
basis. A partial xorg.conf should initiate only the desired input devices.



> By the way, I try to avoid HAL. This may also cause some problems when trying
> suggestions.

When I built my system, I had to compile X and applications explicitely
without HAL support. This should be the default today. So I was able to
setup things "statically" - which means: setup once, keeps working. :-)



> By the way - some companies around I have contact, too, also complained
> massiveley on that crappy touchpad - it goes up even to the high-class
> notebooks from Lenovo.

Lenovo sadly doesn't make "high-class notebooks" anymore; sometimes I'd
like to say: they only make "high-price notebooks", while many parts are
still cheap or crappy, but with a heavy price tag attached. The times
where the brand name Lenovo could be said in the same way like IBM 
(as in "Lenovo Thinkpad" and "IBM Thinkpad") are over. But I feel that
Lenovo has recognized that problem and is working on a solution at
least on some newer models now...





-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...