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The personal web site of Warren Guy of Perth, Western Australia

Disabling "tap" clicking on a Synaptics Touchpad on Linux

I recently bought a new notebook (Sony TZ27GN, which is awesome by the way :D), and something that immediately annoyed me is the sensitivity of the touchpad - so many times I would accidentally "click" while dragging across the touchpad.

So I disabled this feature. Here's how, running Ubuntu Linux:

  1. Open your xorg.conf file for editing as root 
    gksudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf
  2. Find the Synaptics Touchpad InputDevice section, it should look something like this: 
          Section "InputDevice"
                Identifier      "Synaptics Touchpad"
                Driver          "synaptics"
                Option          "SendCoreEvents"        "true"
                Option          "Device"                "/dev/psaux"
                Option          "Protocol"              "auto-dev"
                Option          "HorizEdgeScroll"       "0"
                Option          "TapButton1"            "0"
      EndSection
  3. Add this line right before EndSection: 
                    Option          "TapButton1"            "0"
  4. Save the file, then log out and log back in

That's it!

This was first published in my SysAdmin blog on 30 November 2007.

Page modified 44 weeks ago