Annoyances: May 2007 Archives

Anyone who uses a laptop with a Touchpad has probably accidentally touched the Touchpad while typing and had the window focus change on screen. It probably isn't a good reflection on the typing posture being used, but until some comes out with a laptop that has a Microsoft Natural Keyboard built in, my posture isn't likely to improve. As I have found out though, it's easy to disable a Synaptic Touchpad while typing. First off open up /etc/X11/xorg.conf (or /etc/X11/XF86Config-4) and find the InputDevice Section that looks like:

Section "InputDevice"
Driver "synaptics"
Identifier "Mouse[1]"
Option "Device" "/dev/psaux"
Option "Protocol" "auto-dev"
.........

At the end of this section add:

Option "SHMConfig" "on"

Save the changes and then restart the X server, in my case I just used Ctrl-Alt-Backspace to restart it. Syndaemon then has to be setup in order to tell the driver how long the Touchpad has to remain disabled for after typing. To do this run:

syndaemon -i .1 -d

This will disable the Touchpad while typing and keep it disabled for a tenth of a second after you finish typing. The default, if you don't put in the "-i .1", is two seconds which I found way too long. There are a couple of options to get this running automatically. With Gnome, click on the "System" menu, go to "Preferences" and then "Sessions". In the "Startup Programs" tab, click on "New" and put in "syndaemon -i .1 -d" as the command. It can alternatively be added to the ~/.xinitrc file. Once this is done, syndaemon will run on login, and random touching of the Touchpad while typing should no longer be a cause for annoyance.

I have previously moaned about the lack of open source drivers for ATI/AMD cards. AMD have now announced that they will be releasing opensource drivers. I think I will be switching allegiances from Nvidia (who currently have the better binary drivers) to ATI/AMD if they deliver.