turning off the touchpad [solved]

[doug]

On Fri, 9 Sep 2016, doug wrote:

> With the lastest version of Xorg they seem to have removed the ability to do 
> this. AFAIK from google, the x11 mailing list and X.org this is not 
> considered an issue or a bug. I found some stuff in FreeBSD 11.0 with 
> sysctrls that might work there (although their issue was turning it on, if 
> only...) those controls do not exist in FreeBSD 10.3.
>
> It appears that the change in integrating all support for pointing devices in 
> a single driver. In my 10.1 system the touchpad was supported by a driver 
> using ps2 interface, so adding [moused_port="/dev/ums0"] to rc.conf fixed the 
> problem.
>
> I am posting here as I hope someone has found a workaround. On some laptops 
> (esp mine) it is very hard to touch type and miss the touchpad. I wish you 
> could turn it off in the BIOS, but no such luck.

This turns out to be easy. I got pointed to the answer from the freebsd-x11 
list. Use 'xinput list' to get the id of the psm device and then

    xinput set-prop 8 "Device Enabled" 0

will disable it. I suppose that means adding an InputDevice section to 
/usr/local/etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/ should also work. I could not figure out the 
options from the man page however.