Disable touchscreen in Linux

I have a Dell Inspiron 5547, massive laptop with 16GB RAM and Intel i7. It also got a touchscreen. I don’t like touchscreens on laptops and I can’t remember ever using it. I usually plugin my laptop, Desktop and RaspberryPi 2 to an IOGear 4port KVM switch and use a single keyboard and mouse with Dual-screen display. So my point is, I just wanted to disable the touchscreen cause the few times I tried to clean my screen of some dust, (forgetting I have a touchscreen), it messed up my terminal session. I did some tests and found the best way to disable touchscreen in Linux. So here goes:

List loaded modules

Hardware drivers these days uses loadable Kernel module (LKM). So I simply listed all kernel modules and searched for anything that was described as touchscreen.

root@kali:~# lsmod | grep touch
hid_multitouch         20480  0
hid                   118784  5 i2c_hid,hid_multitouch,hid_generic,hid_rmi,usbhid

Note that hid_multitouch module … that is possibly what we are looking for.

Find more info about module

We need to ensure that we got the right module by looking into using modinfo

root@kali:~# modinfo hid_multitouch | head
filename:       /lib/modules/4.7.0-kali1-amd64/kernel/drivers/hid/hid-multitouch.ko
license:        GPL
description:    HID multitouch panels
author:         Benjamin Tissoires <benjamin.tissoires@gmail.com>
author:         Stephane Chatty <chatty@enac.fr>

Seems legit, as the description clearly says it’s for HID multitouch panels.

Disable touchscreen module

We could try to remove this hid_multitouch to see if that disables touchscreen.

root@kali:~# modprobe -r hid_multitouch 

It worked.

I was also looking in /var/log/messages

root@kali:~# tail -f /var/log/messages

Oct 19 10:58:35 kali /usr/lib/gdm3/gdm-x-session[2299]: (II) config/udev: removing device ELAN Touchscreen
Oct 19 10:58:35 kali /usr/lib/gdm3/gdm-x-session[2299]: (**) Option "fd" "46"
Oct 19 10:58:35 kali gnome-settings-[2505]: g_signal_handlers_disconnect_matched: assertion 'G_TYPE_CHECK_INSTANCE (instance)' failed

gnome/gdm3 wasn’t too happy … but that’s normal. Double-checking using lsmod again

root@kali:~# lsmod | grep touch

returns nothing, which is exactly what we wanted.

Making it permanent

Now this is still temporary. Next time I restart my laptop, it will load this hid_multitouch module again. To stop this Linux kernel module from auto loading, we need blacklist it.

In Kali / Debian / Ubuntu, it’s as simple as creating a new blacklist file in modprobe.d folder with correct module name:

root@kali:~# vi /etc/modprobe.d/hid_multitouch.conf
# Use following syntax 
# blacklist driver-name
blacklist hid_multitouch

Save the file and reboot, hid_multitouch module will not be loaded next time. You can follow the same process to disable / unload Linux Kernel modules or blacklist Linux Kernel modules.

Conclusion

This guide explained and concentrated on how to disable touchscreen in Linux. But as you can see, you can disable almost any modules similarly. Just do it temporarily first and you’ll be pretty safe on a single user machine.