Re: X: standard method for "switching off" left mouse button?

[Florian von Savigny]

gebser@ameritech.net writes:

> Ca va.  I experienced exactly the same very annoying problem.  The
> best/quickest solution I found was to plug a regular mouse into the
> laptop.

> Another note: any emacs solution you implement should work only when the 
> focus is on emacs, meaning that if the mouse pointer is on, say, a 
> terminal window, when you accidently touch the mousepad, it'll bring up 
> that terminal window.  

I think that would have been practical, since the problem only becomes
apparent to me when entering text in Emacs. Under X in general, the
feature was quite charming (I have now disabled it with the help of
tpconfig, see Alan's posting).

> So the disabling of the mouse should be done in 
> X; look in /etc/X11/XF86Config* for the mouse section.  The problem with 
> this "solution", however, is that you'd have to restart X every time you 
> wanted to disable or enable the mouse... probably as much a hassle as 
> dealing with touchpad accidents.

Hmm, I think that this is feasible if you can do without the mouse
altogether under X (not a bad idea on a laptop, I'd say).

> Now for a completely crazy idea: /dev/mouse is a symlink to /dev/psaux.  
> It could possibly, conceivably, theoretically be possibly theoretically 
> conceivable to disable the mouse by removing /dev/mouse and then enable 
> it again with "ln -s /dev/psaux /dev/mouse".  You might try that (on 
> your boss's computer when he's not around).  I'd be curious to know if 
> that works, but not curious enough to try it on my own box.  B^+


What's the rationale behind that? (I didn't try it - when your
proposal appeared, I had just installed tpconfig, which seems perfect).

Thanks a lot for your proposals anyway!

Florian