The Touchpad

It's nice to be able to configure the touchpad. I find it often gets in the way when I'm trying to type because my palms hit it accidentally. To be able to configure the touchpad, add this line to the InputDevice section of xorg.conf:
Option "SHMConfig" "true"

Then install packages synaptics, the driver for the touchpad, and gsynaptics, a GUI for changing the touchpad settings.

The GUI will add a new "Touchpad" menu item to the System->Preferences->More Preferences menu. The driver gives you a program called synclient. synclient appears to offer more configuration possibilities than gsynaptics but I haven't tried them all out yet.

Anyways, to turn off the touchpad run this command
synclient TouchpadOff=1
and, to turn it back on
synclient TouchpadOff=0