Yes it is very easy. Blacklist the touchpad module.
To find out what module it is, you can run
grep -iA 2 touchpad /proc/bus/input/devices
Here you will see something like elan or synaptic
And then
ls $(find /lib/modules/$(uname -r) -type d -name mouse)
To see all the mouse & touchpad modules for the current kernel. The touchpad will have i2c
or touch
in the name, mouse modules will have mouse
or usb
. Cross reference these two results
Edit: I recently figured out how to reliably get the name of the driver in use with a convoluted command, which terdon simplified nicely for me:
grep -hriPo 'DRIVER=\K.+' /sys 2>/dev/null | while read driver; do [ -e /lib/modules/$(uname -r)/kernel/drivers/input/mouse/"$driver"* ] && echo $driver; done
I'm guessing your touchpad module is synaptics_i2c.ko
. You will omit the .ko
when writing the blacklist
check you got the right module
sudo modprobe -r synaptics_i2c
immediately the touchpad will die, if you got the correct module. Now to prevent it from ever being loaded:
Create a file in the /etc/modprobe.d
directory with the .conf
extension, containing the words blacklist synaptics_i2c
(replace with your module name, excluding .ko
). For example
echo "blacklist synaptics_i2c" | sudo tee /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-touch.conf
(but check that the filename you choose does not already exist)