Ubuntu – How to disable the touchpad using the upper left corner on an HP Pavilion dv6

dv6hptouchpad

To disable the touchpad on an HP Pavilion dv6, you double tap on an area in the upper left hand corner of the touchpad. Then the blue indicator light around the border of the touchpad turns red, and the touchpad is disabled.

Double tapping on this area again turns the touchpad turns back on. I do a lot of typing, and frequently bump the touchpad, messing up my work and annoying me. So, I would like to enable the ability to disable the touchpad by double-tapping on the area in the upper left hand corner. Unfortunately, there is no function key backup to disable the touchpad.

This does not work in Ubuntu. I can turn it off using touchpad-indicator, but the program must be manually started and you have to disable using the key combination. Double-tapping the area is much easier. My computer is the HP Pavilion dv6-6135dx. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Best Answer

gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.peripherals.touchpad disable-while-typing true

will disable your touchpad while you are typing and re-enable it when it feels that you are using your finger on the touchpad.

Not sure if it will fit your needs but its a solution that fits me perfectly on my laptop.

To revert to the default parameter use

gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.peripherals.touchpad disable-while-typing false

If it doesn't help drop a comment, well figure out something about your touchpad.

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Ubuntu – Touchpad not working on HP Pavilion dv6

You may try reverting the change you did (or keeping it) and installing the gpointing-device-settings package, which will provide more configuration options for your touchpad.

sudo apt-get install gpointing-device-settings

Once installed you find it under System -> Preferences -> Pointing Devices.

Ubuntu – How to enable disable touchpad from double-clicking on its special area

You should report this as a bug. The best place to report this is the xserver-xorg-input-synaptics package (FreeDesktop Bugs). See this question for good bug reporting guidelines. You can also post the bug link here, and I will update its status periodically. I have placed a workaround down below in case you want to try an alternate solution. Please note that you will be reporting a bug to the FreeDesktop system. After logging in, choose report a bug. Report the bug against the Xorg package. When prompted for the component, make sure to select input/synaptics. Fill in any other specific information that is needed.

Bug Tracker for ID NaN

Status: Lookup Error 3
Importance: Lookup Error 3
Assigned To: Lookup Error 3

(Link to Bug)

In a short answer, this is not possible because there are no Linux drivers that do this. (Report a bug to possibly get one!)

This touchpad works by having that dipped area be its own button. When it is double-tapped, the Windows driver says "Hey, I should disable/enable the touchpad!". It then sends the disable or enable message to the touchpad, settings its state.

When you reboot, power to the touchpad isn't lost. So, whatever state it was in is kept. When you fully shut down, power is lost, so the state is reset.

AFAIK, there is no method to do this with that dip, at least kernel-wise. You may be able to write your own driver, but that is beyond the scope of this question (and possibly even this site).

You may be able to do a little workaround, which goes like this:

First off, find your touchpad in xinput-list. Remeber the ID.

Save this into /usr/bin:

#!/bin/bash

if [ -e /tmp/mouse-disabled ]; then
  rm -f /tmp/mouse-disabled
  xinput enable [id]
else
  touch /tmp/mouse-disabled
  xinput disable [id]
fi;

Replace all instances with ID with your proper id.
Create a Keyboard Shortcut. Make this the program to be run, and assign any keybind you want. I used Win+Ctrl+T for a while.

(Sourced from most posts here and this post.)

Best Answer

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Ubuntu – Touchpad not working on HP Pavilion dv6

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