The SysAdmin Diary

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!