Touchpad Configuration and some sudo issues

The documentation for configuring a Touchpad under Ubuntu was most helpful, but didn't quite go far enough. I don't much like touchpads. Maybe it's just me but I could never get used to the whole "tapping can act like a mouse-click" part. The usual effect of it was that I would inadvertently tap the touchpad when moving the cursor, causing the computer to believe I'd "clicked the mouse" at times when that was the last thing I wanted to do.

GNOME's configuration had an easy way to turn off the behaviour. But it only worked in GNOME. The instructions linked above about enabling SHMConfig in a configuration file and then using the gsynaptics application to configure the touchpad was effective enough - once. Unfortunately gsynaptics didn't keep a permanent record of my changes, which meant that I had to manually disable the "touchpad tap" thingy each and every time I booted up anew.

I forget where I read the solution - I think it was an Ubuntu forum - but there is a way of ensuring that the "touchpad tap" is permanently disabled via the same configuration file used to enable SHMConfig. The resulting contents of the file /etc/hal/fdi/policy/shmconfig.fdi looks like this on my system:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<deviceinfo version="0.2">:
 <device>
  <match key="input.x11_driver" string="synaptics">
   <merge key="input.x11_options.SHMConfig" type="string">True</merge>
    <merge key="input.x11_options.MaxTapTime" type="string">0</merge>
</match>
 </device>
</deviceinfo>

All I've done is add an extra line to the recommended contents of the file used to enable SHMConfig: setting the "MaxTapTime" value to zero, which disables the tap.

Sidepoint: while gksudo is the preferred method in GNOME for starting graphical applications with super-user privileges from the commandline, a KDE version also exists called "kdesudo". It's used in the same way, so creating and editing the file "/etc/hal/fdi/policy/shmconfig.fdi" using KDE's text editor (named "Kate") would be done with the following command:

kdesudo kate /etc/hal/fdi/policy/shmconfig.fdi