Enable/disable input devices
The right mouse button on my eeepc keeps troubling me intermittently (the right button remains pressed–probably it’s shorted sometimes). Although I rarely use the touchpad and its buttons (use a wireless mouse instead), the constant input of right click makes the eeepc unusable when this happens.
The solution?
Xorg provides a facility to control/configure the input devices while plugged in through ‘xinput’.
First, get the full name of the device with
xinput list
identify the device name from the list, e.g., “ImPS/2 Generic Wheel Mouse”
Then, to disable a device, run
xinput --set-int-prop "ImPS/2 Generic Wheel Mouse" "Device Enabled" 8 0
The 8 in this command is the ‘format’ of the attribute. The syntax for ‘xinput’ for newer Xorg is different (use –set-props instead).
To enable it back, run
xinput --set-int-prop "ImPS/2 Generic Wheel Mouse" "Device Enabled" 8 1
