Disabling Dell Latitude D600 mouse pointer stick on Linux Mint 8 (Ubuntu 9.10)
Posted May 6th, 2010 by Tim CollinsSorry… have to geek out for a second. (This post is mostly for me. In case I need to do this again.)
Ubuntu 10.04 came out a few weeks ago, so I decided to do a fresh install on our kitchen laptop (Dell Latitude D600). All went well except for two things. The wireless connection would drop and reconnect. It happened often enough for it to be almost unusable. The second problem was the little mouse nub eraser nipple thingy in the middle of the laptop keyboard. When you typed it would move the mouse and then the mouse would have about a 30 second panic attack and you couldn’t get control of the thing. Typically the closer the key was to the pointer the worse the mouse would drift or wander around the screen. I searched for a while to try to fix both problems with no success. I did find this… Fixing mouse drift on a Dell Latitude C600 with a Sledgehammer
I gave up… and decided to give Linux Mint 8 a try. Installation was easy and wireless seems to be working with no problems. But the mouse drift problem is still there. After more searching I finally found this… Fully disabling touchpad in Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala
His solution worked for me. Here is the command I used…
xinput set-int-prop "DualPoint Stick" "Device Enabled" 8 0
I also added that command to my “Startup Applications” just like the other post discribes so this command will always run and disable the pointer.
