Today I was typing up a mail, the second I hit send in my mail client, my mouse pointer starts to shake and jump slowly but annoyingly enough to make it unworkable, I suspected that my 10 year old IntellyEye mouse went on life-support but when I unplugged it, it was still happening, also when I moved to another USB port. (I have 5 of them to try).
Somehow my touchpad caused all this. So I had to disable it entirely in Ubuntu. It’s really easy to do so:
⎡ Virtual core pointer id=2 [master pointer (3)]
⎜ ↳ Virtual core XTEST pointer id=4 [slave pointer (2)]
⎜ ↳ Microsoft Microsoft 5-Button Mouse with IntelliEye(TM) id=9 [slave pointer (2)]
⎜ ↳ PS/2 Mouse id=12 [slave pointer (2)]
⎜ ↳ AlpsPS/2 ALPS GlidePoint id=13 [slave pointer (2)]
⎣ Virtual core keyboard id=3 [master keyboard (2)]
↳ Virtual core XTEST keyboard id=5 [slave keyboard (3)]
↳ Video Bus id=6 [slave keyboard (3)]
↳ Power Button id=7 [slave keyboard (3)]
↳ Sleep Button id=8 [slave keyboard (3)]
↳ Laptop Integrated Webcam id=10 [slave keyboard (3)]
↳ AT Translated Set 2 keyboard id=11 [slave keyboard (3)]
↳ Dell WMI hotkeys id=14 [slave keyboard (3)]
If one of the lines mentions a touchpad or glidepoint (perhaps also “Synaptics” or “ALPS”), your touchpad has been detected. For me that is ID 13. On the command line, as the user who’s logged into X-windows you do:
And the touchpad is disabled, this works right away. My problem was gone, and my TouchPad too, I don’t used it anyway.