I've installed power saving packages (bumblebee, laptop-mode-tools, and cpufreq) to my laptop with Debian Wheezy. Thanks to that I decrease power usage from 32W to 10W. But now I faced the issue that I can't disable touchpad. I wrote simple script that inverts state of touch-pad:
#!/bin/sh
synclient TouchpadOff=`synclient | grep TouchpadOff | awk '{print !$3}'`
When I launch this script, it inverts state of touch-pad as expected, but in 5 seconds TouchpadOff is rewritten with value "2", and touch-pad becomes active again.
I suppose that it's laptop-mode-tools who modifies TouchpadOff variable. I tried to find related settings in laptop-mode-tools, but didn't find anything.
Any ideas how to determine who modifies TouchpadOff variable and how to disable such a modification?
Best Answer
I resolved my issue without disabling touchpad. The original issue was that I touched my touchpad area by my palms clicking controls that I didn't wanna click. My previous laptop had Fn hot key to disable touchpad, but it doesn't work in my current laptop, therefore I decided to write the script to disable it, that finally lead me asking the question here.
But actually I have Buttonless TouchPad (aka ClickPad). Having it I can change the mode of clicking at UI components in Linux. Available options are click by touch and click by click on clickpad. I had click by touch option selected. And of course it was very annoying to have the focus changed all the time I type something, especially taking into account that my ClickPad is very big.
So how to switch to clicking at UI components by click on ClickPad? I have Gnome 3, but the idea should be the same in Unity, and probably some others. Go to System Settings, select 'Mouse and Touchpad' item there. Go to the 'Touchpad' tab and deselect 'Enable mouse clicks with touchpad' checkbox. That's it :)
Unfortunately there are still the cases when this solution won't be acceptable for you. For instance if you have TouchPad (not ClickPad) or if your ClickPad is hard to press. In this cases it would be suitable to disable touchpad programmatically. Therefore I leave this question unanswered.