Hey everyone! This comes up fairly often, either the touchscreen doesn’t work or the user simply doesn’t want it to work. So here’s a tidbit on how to disable the touchscreen. If anyone has any better suggestions I’d be open to hearing them. This is just what I’ve found works fairly well.
First you’ll need to launch Terminal.
Then you’ll want to navigate to /usr/share/x11/xorg.conf.d
Then you’re gonna fire up your favorite text editor such as nano or vi then you’re gonna edit the 10-evdev.conf file.
For example your input would look like
sudo nano /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/10-evdev.confThen in the list of applications you’re gonna look for the touchscreen option, it may be named something else but in my device it’s called Identifer “evdev touchscreen catchall”
On the bottom of that entry you’re going to edit the entry that reads MatchIsTouchscreen “on” to “off” be sure to include the quotation marks.
What you’ve effectively done is ignored any input on the touchscreen. Please note this doesn’t truly disable the device, it just prevents a wonky touchscreen device from constantly moving your mouse or pointer, etc. I’ve tried other tricks but this is the only one that seems to persist between logins and reboots. If anyone has a better way, I’d be willing to learn it.
Hope this helps I know it ended my frustration.
Note: Updated on 5/7/2016 due to differences with MATE 16.04
