Disable touchpad while typing option causes disabled touchpad to be re-enabled

[Martin Schwenke]

Binary package hint: gnome-control-center

In Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) the "Disable touchpad while typing" option causes an otherwise disabled touchpad to be re-enabled after typing ceases.

The expected behaviour is that a disabled touchpad stays disabled until it is explicitly re-enabled.

To reproduce:

1. Enable the "Disable touchpad while typing" option in "Properties -> Mouse -> Touchpad".

2. Disable the touchpad via the ACPI hotkey (Fn-F8 on my ThinkPad); or

     xinput set-int-prop "SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad" "Synaptics Off" 8 1

3. Type.

4. Stop typing: the touchpad has been enabled again.

Disabling the "Disable touchpad while typing" option stops the touchpad from being re-enabled. This is a workaround.

Another workaround is to completely disable the device by doing something like:

  xinput set-int-prop "SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad" "Device Enabled" 8 0

This seems to stop the above option in its tracks.

The real fix would seem to be to have the "Disable touchpad while typing" option respect the "Synaptics Off" setting.

The bug is in gnome-mouse-properties from:

  gnome-control-center:
    Installed: 1:2.28.1-0ubuntu1

[Chris Coulson (chrisccoulson)]

This isn't a gnome-control-center issue. Either gnome-settings-daemon shouldn't spawn syndaemon if the touchpad was disabled, or syndaemon shouldn't re-enable the touchpad after you stop typing (which would be a xserver-xorg-input-synaptics bug)

[patspam (pat-patspam)]

Can someone reassign this bug to the appropriate package then?

[patspam (pat-patspam)]

Thanks Chris!

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.