Disable Trackpad on Dell E6400

Man,

This Trackpad sucks! Well with *nix anyways ;-) Google "dell e6400 trackpad" and you'll soon come across a number of people that have reported bugs for the driver and or hardware [0]. I even asked chaps on a mailing list a similar question some time ago [1].

Why? If you as much as fart on the trackpad or look at it whilst typing you'll find that your mouse will go all over the place and you'll fight to get it back to where you think that it is supposed to be. Your /var/log/messages file will be littered with

psmouse.c: DualPoint TouchPad at isa0060/serio1/input0 lost sync at byte 6 or some such crap.

dmesg | grep ^psmouse | wc -l
89

and that ain't good. Seeing this error so many times is tedious and fighting with your mouse gets very boring, particularly if you spend most of your time in a terminal, writing code or administering servers like me ;-)

On the train home I ran
man -k X

which listed xinput. The man page don't really tell you much as to how to actually use it. Sometimes I wonder why I bother or why people write such cryptic man pages :-/ Anyways, after an hour of mucking about
xinput --set-prop "AlpsPS/2 ALPS DualPoint TouchPad" "Synaptics Off" 1

taaaadaaaaaaa! The trackpad has been killed - hurrah! No more stinking, nasty trackpad!! Next step is to get this automated so that I don't have to run this command when this laptop boots. I've seen from the bug reports and attempts at solutions from the Ubuntu buglist(s) that there's some stuff going on in hal/fdi. Dunno too much about this and I'll prolly add this to the todo list.

ls /usr/share/hal/fdi/policy/
10osvendor 20thirdparty

Added:-

Comment to self:- The trackpad on a Macbook Pro is not bad and does what it is supposed to do - move when you want it moved and __not__ when you touch it by accident....
[0] http://www.mail-archive.com/xorg@lists.freedesktop.org/msg08701.html
[1] http://old.nabble.com/permanently-setting-%60-gpointing-device-settings%60-td26216677.html