Disabling Touchpad on Demand

There's now an alternative to using the shared memory of the synaptic driver to enable and disable the touchpad:

xinput set-int-prop "SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad" "Synaptics Off" 8 1 (enable)
xinput set-int-prop "SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad" "Synaptics Off" 8 0 (disable)

This should work out of the box in Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid). But it doesn't. At least not for me. But this works for me:

xinput set-int-prop "SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad" "Synaptics Off" 8 0
xinput set-int-prop "SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad" "Synaptics Off" 8 1

Nice! :)