I am not sure if this the right place so move this thread if needed.

I have a HP pavillion dv6 intel i7 with kubuntu 11.10 and KDE4.7.2 installed.

I would like to turn off my touchpad (Synaptics TouchPad driver for X.Org server installed) when my usb mouse is plugged in but cannot find out where to edit/change settings.

Can someone point me in the right direction please. This is really annoying

don't have so don't know but these tools look appropriate

http://kde-apps.org/content/show.php/sy ... ent=114270
http://kde-apps.org/content/show.php/kc ... ent=113335
http://kde-apps.org/content/show.php/sy ... ent=114270

you could also write scripts or shortcuts to do this with the commands:
synclient TouchpadOff=1
synclient TouchpadOff=0
see man pages of synclient and synaptics for explanations

note: the above maybe Synaptics touchpad specific,

Thank you for that, but those links look like arch versions or older versions of Ubuntu PPA's

I'll have to dig further into this

you should search the Kubuntu ppa's for relavent packages, using terms synaptics and touchpad? http://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywo ... ection=all http://packages.ubuntu.com/search?keywo ... ection=all

since all links above include source code it might be worthwhile to learn to compile and install from source

On my HP Pavilion g7-1070us laptop, I just installed the synaptiks package, which appears in K > Utilities, marked it to 'Place in system tray' then launched it and checked the 'Automatically switch off touchpad, if a mouse is plugged' in Touchpad management. Works great.

Thanks snowhog, exactly what I was looking for. I didn't see that when doing synaptics from alt+F2