Time to kill the Dell E6400

Time to give this bastard up. I hate this freaking laptop!

lscpu
Architecture: x86_64
CPU(s): 2
Thread(s) per core: 1
Core(s) per socket: 2
CPU socket(s): 1
NUMA node(s): 1
Vendor ID: GenuineIntel
CPU family: 6
Model: 23
Stepping: 10
CPU MHz: 800.000
Virtualization: VT-x
L1d cache: 32K
L1i cache: 32K
L2 cache: 6144K

Decent chip I guess but it is bulky, ugly and the freaking trackpack is horrid!

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

Trackpads suck

I have Dell E6400 laptop. Good battery life, keyboard ain't bad. Decent screen. Only thing that I cannot stand is the *ing trackpad. If it gets even a whiff of my thumb it sends the mouse -crazy- and it goes all over the place.

I use fedora12 on this laptop and have not found a /simple/ method to kill this trackpad. BIOS has an option to disable the t/p completely when a USB mouse is inserted but who wants that? This is a "laptop" and I should be able to use the "eraser head" nipple in between the keys....

... groan, rant and grilllaaaaa!