AAAARGH! Synaptics touchpad will NOT stay turned off

English Hardware
#1

Laptop here is HP 635. OS is 11.4. 64 KDE 4.6

I’m at wits end here. I’ve tried everything I know or have been able to find here to turn my touchpad off and keep it off. Ran synclient Touchpadoff =1. edited /etc/x11/xorg.conf.d/50-synaptics.conf to set “Option” “Touchpadoff” “1”. Installed gsynaptics. Ran it and deselected “enabled”. Each of these things will turn the touchpad off. But after a couple of minutes I find it’s enabled again. I’m a touch typist which puts my right thumb way to close to the pad when I’m typing. (I hit it three times while typing this)
What can I try?

#2

> What can I try?

tales of both successes and failures here:
http://www.google.com/search?q=“HP+635”+linux+“disable+touchpad”

–
DD
openSUSE®, the “German Engineered Automobile” of operating systems!

#3

Since you use KDE, you should be able to use the KDE controls
Personal Settings → Input Devices

I have mine set to automatically turn off the touchpad if there is usb mouse.

If it accepts the setting, but the setting still does not work, then install “hal”.

#4

If all else fails you can try a dirty, nauseating hack. Copy the lines below to a text file, make it executable and drop it in ~/kde4/Autostart. Change the 120 to the number of seconds you want between touchpad-disabling-command executions, if necessary. Restart KDE.

#!/bin/bash

while true; do
  sleep 120
  <substitute this line with your touchpad-disabling command>
done
#5

Thanks for all who replied. I never did find KDE Controls, but in my exploration I did find the Synaptiks touchpad applet. I kind of knew that the Synaptiks daemon was running, but I didn’t know how to access or configure it. Found he applet and added it to the taskmanager panel. It allows my to toggle the status of the touchpad.