RE:How to disable touchpad while typing on Ubuntu

[DavidSnider]

Hey,

So I tried your solution to the scrolling being disabled after using syndaemon. It worked great at first, but now for some reason my mouse keeps locking when typing and then never unlocking. Thoughts?

[invernizzie]

Sorry, David, never saw this. Sounds like the daemon is not working well for your configuration. There is no parameter to set the unlock delay, so I wouldn't know how to go about troubleshooting...

[invernizzie]

Actually, my bad, there is. It's set with the -i option. How are you starting the daemon?

There's also an option to set polling interval that could help you fix this by trial & error. The -R option might help as well. Refer to http://linux.die.net/man/1/syndaemon

[DavidSnider]

Hmmm. I was running it with
sudo syndaemon -i 1 -K -d
which I believe to be equidistant to your instructions. I then follow your instructions on how to reenable scrolling. The odd thing is that if I don't reenable scrolling, I don't think my cursor locks up.

[invernizzie]

Ha! That's funny... I'm inclined to suspect the synaptics driver. Not sure how to help though :(

[DavidSnider]

Interesting update: I've discovered the cause of the problem. For some reason, under certain conditions, my touchpad was being marked as disabled (presumably by syndaemon for the decided period of time, 1 second in my case) but then not being marked as enable afterwards. My current hacky fix is just this line in my bashrc:

alias restart_touchpad='sudo synclient TouchpadOff=0 && sudo syndaemon -i 1 -K -d'

that I run whenever this occurs. I'm interested if this might be a bug with syndaemon?