Disabling touch screen only temporarily [duplicate]

My touchscreen is cracked, so the pointer continuously clicks on the cracked area. That prevents me from using the computer normally.

I have tried the xinput disable 'ELAN Touchscreen' command, and even the one specific to the input number (though it should make no difference), yet whenever I do this, touch is re-enabled after only a few seconds.

Is there some way to disable the screen permanently until I decide to turn it on again (when I finally go to fix it)?

4 Answers

To first find the id of the device use:

xinput -list

From there find the name of the touch screen and then run:

xinput disable DEVICE

where DEVICE is the device name enclosed in quotes or its id.

I don't have a touchscreen to test it but you could install dconf-editor

sudo apt-get install dconf-editor

And try to disable the touchscreen like I did for my touchpad, there's a dedicated entry for touchscreen, just below touchpad:

Try the following command, where $usbid is the ID of the USB device you want to disable:

echo -n $usbid | sudo tee -a /sys/bus/usb/drivers/usb/unbind

Or equivalently, run the following command as root:

echo $usbid > /sys/bus/usb/drivers/usb/unbind

You can find the ID of your device by running the following command:

dmesg | tail -20

For me, I had to use usb1:

echo -n "usb1" | sudo tee -a /sys/bus/usb/drivers/usb/unbind

The following article has more information about manual driver binding and unbinding:

For me, bowmanb's answer to this question solved the problem of how to disable touchscreen drivers in Ubuntu.

(Below story has some keywords for incoming searches, in case other people are having similar problems)

My touchscreen on my Samsung Series 5 isn't cracked, but I had been getting a strange bug randomly off and on for the last few months that I couldn't isolate.

Basically - in Ubuntu 12.04 and 14.04 the mouse would jump to the left side of the screen and start spamming click events.

Very annoying when your dock is on the left side of the screen, and it starts randomly opening a lot of applications. ;)

Anyway - it finally started happening often enough that I isolated the touchscreen as the source of the problem. The above answer fixed it for me!