I have got this new Dell Vostro n3500 Laptop, which is really a solid machine. I am very happy to have made this choice.

As a hardcore UBUNTU User, I always liked to have any feature available in Windows to be made available in Ubuntu as well :)…

Recently, I realized that the “Fn+F6” shortcut to disable the Touchpad does not work… I am sure many of you would have encountered the annoying behavior of touchpad moving your cursor to some place while you are typing something…

The most ideal solution I would have liked is that, when I connect an external mouse, the touchpad should automatically be disabled. Apparently, I did not find any solution for this in the current version of Ubuntu 10.04(Lucid Lynx). Google did not help me either.

So, the next thing is, is there any way I can tell Ubuntu to disable touchpad when I start typing. Yes, there is such an option in the “Mouse Preferences”. But that is not working consistently atleast for me.

So, now this is what I did. I wrote a small Ruby script(I am a big big fan of Ruby) that can toggle the Touchpad ON and OFF.

Now, the next thing is to make it hooked to a keyboard shortcut like the one in Windows…Fn+F6. Apparently, I also found that I cannot assign the combination of “Fn” Key and “F6” to the Keyboard shortcut in Ubuntu. So for now, I have simply assigned “F6” key for this toggle switch tool.

The script is not a big deal, but in any case, its here…

touch_pad_setting = `synclient -l | grep TouchpadOff`
new_touch_pad_setting = touch_pad_setting =~ /1/ ? "0" : "1"
`synclient TouchpadOff=#{new_touch_pad_setting}`