Disabling the touchpad on Ubuntu on a Dell XPS12

One of my most loved features of some Touchpad drivers are “Disable when another pointing device is connected”. I have been trying for a while to get the same thing running on my XPS, as the touchpad is so big and the keyboard so small, it is almost always an annoyance when you accidentally touch it. Well, today I found a quick solution, albeit a manual one. I have tried GPointing Device Settings, Touchpad Indicator and more, with no success. The configuration tool in Ubuntu only lets me do some tweaks to speeds etc, but not disable the device. Recently it has annoyed me so much that I went the terminal route and wanted to disable it manually with X11. Hit read more if you want the commands.

Getting back into Linux

So it has been a while since I ran Linux. Mostly because I had spent such an amount of money into my home computer, and felt it was a shame that I was not using it to full effect. So I started playing games using Crossover Office, but I constantly felt the games were not as good as they could be. I was dealing with bugs not allowing me to configure better graphics, random freezes etc. In the end, I concluded that Wine or Crossover is not the future, it is much better to live with Windows and use it for what you need.

But recently I was watching a video on Youtube and saw an ad for Intel 2 in 1. I was intrigued, and did some more Googling and ended up buying a Dell XPS 12, on a whim.

Sound issues

Had sound issues using RPM distributions this time around (OpenSuSE and Mandriva). My sound card is a nVidia Corporation MCP61 High Definition Audio (from lspci), which use an Intel chipset. The problem was that when one application played sound, no other could, even after the first process was killed. Not really sure what the underlying problem is, but the cause was Pulseaudio. Disabling this solved it completely, apparently. If you are using Mandriva, you can quite easily fix it by opening Mandriva Control Panel, Hardware tab and select Configure sound. From there, just uncheck “Enable pulseaudio”.

EDIT:

This was solved installing libalsa-plugins-pulseaudio, but seriously, this version of Mandriva, Powerpack none the less, was so crappy that if you want Mandriva, I think it will be worth waiting for Mageia!

drakx11 pains

Anyone familiar with Mandriva knows the drak tools (various GUI’s to configure your desktop, and most of them are quite excellent), and most likely love them. However, I noticed one flaw with the drakx11 tool, which is used to set up your graphic card. I have a troublesome screen and graphic card combo, where my graphic card are unable to read the EDID the screen sends to it (or properly identify the screen).

This means I use an custom EDID file, which I need to enable in my xorg.conf. However, before this is setup, the resolution is set ridicilously low, something like 640×480 (which is a pain to use, nothing fits on the screen). So I have to add the following line to my xorg.conf:

Option “CustomEDID” “DFP-1:/path/to/custom_edid.bin”

Where DFP-1 is the screen identifier assigned by the nVidia driver (you will find this in nvidia-settings). The file is not the problem, I created that using a very good tutorial over at nvnews and my onboard graphic card. However, on reboot, Mandriva sets my resolution to 1366×768, which is pretty reasnoable considering the size of my screen (26 inches). But I still prefer 1920×1080 and compiz fusion with enhanced desktop zoom, which is where the problems with drakx11 comes. Where nvidia-settings will keep your custom options in your xorg.conf, drakx11 will not. This means that after I had changed my resolution in drakx11, Mandriva reverted to the 640×480 resolution, and I reverted to a backup xorg.conf file each and every time until I figured out what was happening.

Still, was an easy fix, just me being stupid about it and expecting drakx11 to behave like nvidia settings…