How to Temporarily Disable Pen Input on Ubuntu (Jaunty) on Thinkpad X41

Question

I have a Thinkpad X41 tablet PC on which I installed Ubuntu. Everything works fine, including pen input. However, there is a hardware problem which causes the mouse to erratically jump to the bottom of the screen (the problem occurs under both Windows and Linux). It seems to be linked to humidity or static or something. Since it occurs erratically, I need to disable pen input temporarily.

How do I temporarily disable pen input?

I have seen references to xorg.conf, but I do not see anything there related to pen input.

---

(Begin xorg.conf without comments)

Section "Monitor"
    Identifier  "Configured Monitor"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
    Identifier  "Default Screen"
    Monitor     "Configured Monitor"
    Device      "Configured Video Device"
    SubSection "Display"
        Virtual 2048 1011
    EndSubSection
EndSection

Section "Device"
    Identifier  "Configured Video Device"
EndSection

Answer 1

xsetwacom is is a command you can enter in a terminal to set parameters of pens, touchpads etc. Try:xsetwacom list dev and then xsetwacom "<your device> Pen stylus" Stylus off

Answer 2

You can use xinput to temporarily disable you pen input device.

For example, on a Thinkpad x220t, the input devices are listed as:

$ xinput list
⎡ Virtual core pointer                      id=2    [master pointer  (3)]
⎜   ↳ Virtual core XTEST pointer                id=4    [slave  pointer  (2)]
⎜   ↳ TPPS/2 IBM TrackPoint                     id=16   [slave  pointer  (2)]
⎜   ↳ SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad                id=15   [slave  pointer  (2)]
⎜   ↳ Wacom ISDv4 E6 Pen eraser                 id=18   [slave  pointer  (2)]
⎜   ↳ Wacom ISDv4 E6 Finger touch               id=13   [slave  pointer  (2)]
⎜   ↳ Wacom ISDv4 E6 Pen stylus                 id=12   [slave  pointer  (2)]

Thus, to disable all display related devices:

$ xinput disable 'Wacom ISDv4 E6 Pen eraser'
$ xinput disable 'Wacom ISDv4 E6 Finger touch'
$ xinput disable 'Wacom ISDv4 E6 Pen stylus'

Since the laptop also has a TrackPoint which is arguably more useful than a TouchPad, it makes sense to disable it, as well:

$ xinput disable 'SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad'

Alternatively, the finger touch feature (and only the finger touch feature) can also be disabled with xsetwacom:

$ xsetwacom set 'Wacom ISDv4 E6 Pen stylus' touch off