How to disable touchpad on Dell Latitude E-Series (E5510, E6510)?

The failure to recognise the touchpad and fallback to identifying it as a PS2 mouse is due to the hardware using a new protocol and the manufacturer not releasing the specs so that a free driver can be written.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/550625

The protocol has been mostly reverse engineered and there is now a fix involving a patched kernel module, but it isn't completely perfect (won't do multitouch) and hasn't yet found its way into the mainstream kernels. See the discussion for details. It also tells you how to do the patch if you feel brave enough to patch your kernel.

If all you want is to be able to quickly and easily disable the touchpad so you can type, then try setting up keyboard shortcuts as follows.

xinput --set-prop "PS/2 Generic Mouse" "Device Enabled" 0

will disable the touchpad while

xinput --set-prop "PS/2 Generic Mouse" "Device Enabled" 1

will enable it again. Being able to turn the touchpad on and off with a simple key combination makes the problem bearable while we wait for a better solution.

I wrote a small touchpad toggle script that I have bound to the toggle touchpad function key on my e6520 (Fn+F5).

It uses the commands that Peter Torpman posted above.

#!/bin/bash                                                                                          
enabled=`xinput --list-props "ImPS/2 ALPS GlidePoint" | grep -e "Device Enabled\ (127):\s*1"`

if [ -n "$enabled" ]; then
    xinput --set-prop "ImPS/2 ALPS GlidePoint" "Device Enabled" 0
else
    xinput --set-prop "ImPS/2 ALPS GlidePoint" "Device Enabled" 1
fi

I am restricted from downloading and installing drivers / software on a Dell Latitude laptop with the same worthless touchpad (the machine is owned and provided by my employer). My solution to disable the touchpad consists of a 5" x 2 3/4" piece of cardboard, approximately 1/8" thick, and a couple of pieces of tape. Works great! No more stray mouse pointer clobbering my work!