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Before you mark my answer as a duplicate, please read.

I am facing ghost touch issues with my touchscreen on my Dell laptop. I have read through almost all answers here and on other sites and the issue still persists.

Here were some pointers I got.

Suggestion 1: Head over to /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/10-evdev.conf
Situation 1: No such file. I only have 40-libinput.conf

Suggestion 2: In whatever file you have, edit the touchscreen section to add 

Option "Ignore" "on"

Situation 2: No effect

Suggestion 3 : In whatever config file you have turn the match to off.

  MatchIsTouchscreen "off"

Situation 3 : No effect. Sometimes it freezes in the login screen and have to reboot the system.

Suggestion 4 : Find the xinput id of the driver and kill it. Since the id can change anytime, use the name.
Situation 4 : I am a beginner, I ended up writing this piece of shell script.

#!/bin/bash
xinput | while read line ;
do
    if [[ $line =~ .*Touchscreen.* ]]
    then
        idString=$(echo $line|cut -d'=' -f 2)
        id="${idString%%[*}"
        id=$(echo "$id" |xargs)
        echo "Going to Disable Touchscreen with Id: $id"

        xinput disable $id
    fi
done

(The above code was tested successfully when one day the ghost touches magically stopped for a day. I re-enabled it and re-tested. Do point out any mistakes if any, but for the love of god, please do not give me a fancy way to do the same thing)

I was asked to place this in /etc/X11/xinit for global effect and in /home/.config/autorun for user specific effect. I made the script executable as can be seen,

-rwxr-xr-x  1 root root touchscreen_killer.sh*

Now although this seems to work, It does not work always. Every now and then I end up facing ghost touches again, and am unable to even go past the login screen. Even if I do, the ghost touches open up a huge number of applications forcing the PC to finally crash. Hence unable to carry out the silly suggestions like manually finding xinput id and disabling it that I saw in many other answers.

So still I have NOT been able to PERMANENTLY disable my touch screen. It bugs me that it is so easy in Windows. I just disabled the touch screen in Device Manager and windows works fine thereafter. But Ubuntu is is giving me a hard time.

If anyone has any solution that is not mentioned above, please do share. HELP !!

wjandrea
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SamwellTarly
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    Ubuntu 17.10 hit end-of-life earlier this month. You need to switch to a supported release like 18.04. – wjandrea Jul 27 '18 at 15:59
  • Upgraded to Ubuntu 18 as requested. Issue still exists – SamwellTarly Jul 27 '18 at 22:14
  • OK. I've [edit]ed the question accordingly, and retracted my close vote. – wjandrea Jul 27 '18 at 22:32
  • I spent ages (weeks) dealing with this, and though there are many differences, I get the feeling it might help (particularly regarding making your changes stick) if it's not one of the answers you've already read. Sorry I have no time today to look into this in detail, but if it's still a problem when I'm back, I'll do my best to help out. – Ratler Jul 28 '18 at 15:23
  • @Ratler Interesting post, but I see that it is for the older elan instead of the newer libinput – SamwellTarly Jul 29 '18 at 12:44
  • Turns out deleting the whole driver section from /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/40-libinput.conf solved the problem partially. Touch is disabled post login. However touchscreen is still active during login, which I wish to disable and hope for help – SamwellTarly Jul 29 '18 at 12:46
  • Try this solution? https://mastizada.com/blog/disable-touchscreen-in-gnulinux/ – RoundSparrow hilltx Jul 24 '19 at 02:43

0 Answers0