How To Auto-Disable The Touchpad When The Mouse Is Plugged In Fedora 15

Hello all, hopefully this brief how-to will help others, this issue has been bugging me for years. I want the same capability in Fedora that exists in most recent versions of Windows -- disable the touchpad on my laptop if an external mouse is plugged in. Note that my how-to is a little hardware-specific regarding the actual disabling of the touchpad; I'll discuss that more at the end of the guide.

So, here goes:

For my OS (Fedora 13 x86_64) and hardware (Dell Precision M4500) - I needed a specific utility and three scripts. This Dell's trackpad and nipple-stick are seen as an 'internal' PS/2 mouse by Fedora, so I had to install 'xinput' to disable it (and use a very arcane little command-line).

# yum -y install xorg-x11-apps

The enable/disable commands may be different for different hardware ... I had to use some xinput commands to figure out the values I needed:

$ xinput list

    ⎡ Virtual core pointer                        id=2    [master pointer  (3)]
    ⎜   ↳ Virtual core XTEST pointer                  id=4    [slave  pointer  (2)]
    ⎜   ↳ USB Optical Mouse                           id=10    [slave  pointer  (2)]
    ⎜   ↳ PS/2 Generic Mouse                          id=13    [slave  pointer  (2)]

$ xinput list-props "PS/2 Generic Mouse"

    Device 'PS/2 Generic Mouse':
    Device Enabled (119):    1
    ...

This told me that I could use the following:

to disable touchpad:

xinput --set-prop "PS/2 Generic Mouse" "Device Enabled" 0

to enable touchpad:

xinput --set-prop "PS/2 Generic Mouse" "Device Enabled" 1

Google to learn more about using xinput.

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