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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.

1 Answer 1

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The Permission denied error is because you don't have the right permissions for your user. You will need to run your command like so:

sudo gedit /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/51-synaptics-quirks.conf

You can substitute the editor you normally use for gedit

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  • Thank you! That worked to open it. I then pasted the code and got the following message in terminal: ** (gedit:6473): WARNING **: Set document metadata failed: Setting attribute metadata::gedit-spell-language not supported. Also "coding" an "position" not supported.
    – Nick C
    Apr 23, 2017 at 15:04
  • I had entered: # Disable generic Synaptics device, as we're using # "DLL0704:01 06CB:76AE Touchpad" # Having multiple touchpad devices running confuses syndaemon Section "InputClass" Identifier "SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad" MatchProduct "SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad" MatchIsTouchpad "on" MatchOS "Linux" MatchDevicePath "/dev/input/event*" Option "Ignore" "on" EndSection
    – Nick C
    Apr 23, 2017 at 15:07
  • You probably want to open a new question for that error. If this answer helped you solve the original error, you click on the check to the left to accept it as the solution. Apr 23, 2017 at 15:08

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