Ubuntu – How to disable touchpad when using a mouse

Ok, as described in https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/156949/how-to-keep-the-touchpad-but-want-to-deactivate-the-buttons, it's possible to deactivate the hardware buttons in a laptop using xinput. The basic steps are the following:

1. Get the name (or id) of your touchpad

   xinput list
   

2. With that name (or id) you can disable you touchpad totally like this,

   xinput --disable 12
   

   being 12 the id of your touchpad, or you can disable only some buttons, using

   xinput list --long 12
   

   to get a map of the different buttons and then the option --set-button-map to remap them. For example,

   xinput --set-button-map 12 0 0 0 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12
   

   disables the first three buttons in my touchpad, that is, left, center and right.

It appears that gpointing-device-settings was removed possibly due to never being finished and debugged.

In any case, I found touchpad-indicator (site is in Spanish, but Google translated it for me pretty good), also with the code here.

I installed it using:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:atareao/atareao
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install touchpad-indicator

And then running touchpad-indicator I got an icon in the task bar. Clicking on it brought up preferences. Note that the icon was very light by default for me, but under the icon -> preferences -> theme you can make it darker if you like. It also crashed on me the first time with something about a missing file, but the second time I ran it, it seemed to work fine. It may be necessary to manually add it to the default apps for LXSession (under LUbuntu menu -> Preferences) so it will start whenever you log in.