[TriLUG] Advice Please

[Ed Blackman via TriLUG]

On Tue, Mar 04, 2025 at 11:09:07AM +0000, Joseph Mack NA3T wrote:
> my rc file is
> 
> xinput disable 15
> 
> but I had to run it manually after starting X.
> 
> On my machine "15" is the mousepad (a touchpad is not listed). This disables
> both the touchpad and the mouse nubin. I can't disable them separately (they
> aren't listed separately).
> 
> I created a touchpad-disable.desktop file as above, but it didn't do
> anything. I didn't have an autostart directory, so I assume whatever looks
> for an autostart directory is not running on my machine. What looks in
> autostart?

~/.config/autostart is part of the XDG standard for where to place .desktop entries that are run on desktop environment startup:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/XDG_Autostart

Not having that directory means that you haven't configured programs to autostart through KDE, Gnome, or some similar desktop environment (LXDE in my case).  If you're using one of those, I'd expect that you could just create the .desktop entry I posted in that directory, and it would run when you log out and back in.  You might want to throw a "touch /tmp/foo;" inside the sh -c "" to check whether it's being run and just not having an effect on your touchpad, or not being run at all.

If you don't use a desktop environment, the Arch wiki link has references to programs that run autostart entries without a DE, but I don't have any experience with any of them.  Someone with more experience with how you start X might also have a suggestion of where to run the xinput command.

-- 
Ed Blackman