When I put my laptop in my laptop stand I use an external keyboard - but how do I disable the touchpad on that?
http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Synaptics_TouchPad_driver_for_X gives the final pointer - xinput
xinput list
note the ids of all the devices that look like they could be the touchpad
xinput list-props <ID>
shows all the properties for the device
joerg@mint:~/tmp$ xinput list-props 13
Device 'Synaptics Inc. Composite TouchPad / TrackPoint':
Device Enabled (97): 1
Evdev Reopen Attempts (230): 10
Evdev Axis Inversion (239): 0, 0
Evdev Axis Calibration (240):
Evdev Axes Swap (241): 0
Evdev Middle Button Emulation (231): 2
Evdev Middle Button Timeout (232): 50
Evdev Wheel Emulation (233): 0
Evdev Wheel Emulation Axes (234): 0, 0, 4, 5
Evdev Wheel Emulation Inertia (235): 10
Evdev Wheel Emulation Timeout (236): 200
Evdev Wheel Emulation Button (237): 4
Evdev Drag Lock Buttons (238): 0
Synaptics Off (261): 1
so "Device Enabled" is our friend.
xinput set-int-prop 13 "Device Enabled" 8 0
seems to turn it finally off. Now I put that in a little bash script, and have it run at the beginning of my X-Session.