The track stick (also known as pointing stick, TrackPoint, and various other names) can easily be disabled in Ubuntu. I never use it, since my Dell Inspiron has a trackpad that I find more ergonomic to use. Recently, the track stick started to go haywire, sending my mouse pointer all over the screen. Since I don’t use it, I wanted to disable it.
Googling found many old posts that stated that it was impossible.
But, finally, I stumbled upon the xinput utility. It can disable the device!
To list all available input devices:
$ xinput list
⎡ Virtual core pointer id=2
⎜ ↳ Virtual core XTEST pointer id=4
⎜ ↳ Wacom Graphire2 4x5 eraser id=9
⎜ ↳ Wacom Graphire2 4x5 cursor id=10
⎜ ↳ Wacom Graphire2 4x5 id=11
⎜ ↳ AlpsPS/2 ALPS DualPoint TouchPad id=14
⎜ ↳ Macintosh mouse button emulation id=15
⎜ ↳ DualPoint Stick id=13
⎣ Virtual core keyboard id=3
↳ Virtual core XTEST keyboard id=5
↳ Video Bus id=6
↳ Power Button id=7
↳ Sleep Button id=8
↳ AT Translated Set 2 keyboard id=12
The device I want to disable has id 13. Use xinput to list its properties:
$ xinput -list-props 13 Device 'DualPoint Stick': Device Enabled (117): 0 [...several lines removed...] $ xinput -set-prop 13 117 0
Once I knew the solution, I could easily find other posts that mentions it. But what good is that? 🙂
Actually, the device is is dynamically allocated, and can change. So a better command to disable the stick is:
$ xinput -set-prop "DualPoint Stick" "Device Enabled" 0
Let me know if you found the solution via this post.
ceders blog 