I have a brand new Dell Inspiron 15 7579 2-in-1. I've tried running both the following: USB Flash Drive with 17.04, USB external hard drive with 16.04 LTS. In both the cursor jumps backwards or forwards when typing often, and seems to sometimes do a click too. I'm using external devices because I want to make sure ubuntu will work or I'll return the computer.
Tried the Syndaemon
and touchpad app solutions to disable the touchpad while typing; they don't do anything (although I did have one moment where I was able to disable while typing using syndaemon somehow and then the cursor froze and when I restarted and tried again couldn't get it to disable again) , so I suspect they don't work because there are two touchpad devices which are getting confused as described in this post: https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2316240.
The solution described looks promising which is to disable a second touchpad device. I tried the first step of opening Xorg config file in terminal by entering the following:
/usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/51-synaptics-quirks.conf
and when I do this message appears:
bash: /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/51-synaptics-quirks.conf: Permission denied
Not sure what I'm missing. I would like to try this solution if possible!
I'm not too well-versed in the inner workings of using terminal in ubuntu. Please let me know if you can help.