How to Disable Portion Touchscreen in Ubuntu 20.04

Disabling Portion of Touchscreen on Ubuntu 20.04

In this article, we will discuss the steps to disable a portion of a touchscreen on Ubuntu 20.04. This can be useful in cases where a specific area of the touchscreen is causing issues or is unresponsive.

Prerequisites

Before we begin, make sure that you have the following:

• A system running Ubuntu 20.04
• Access to the terminal
• Sudo privileges

Identifying the Touchscreen Device

The first step is to identify the touchscreen device that you want to disable. To do this, run the following command in the terminal:

This will list all the input devices connected to your system. Look for a line that starts with "touchscreen" and note down the device ID.

Disabling the Touchscreen Device

Once you have identified the touchscreen device, you can disable it using the following command:

Replace [device ID] with the ID of the touchscreen device that you want to disable. For example, if the ID of your touchscreen device is 12, the command would be:

This will disable the entire touchscreen device. If you want to disable only a portion of the touchscreen, you will need to use a different method.

Disabling a Portion of the Touchscreen

Disabling a portion of the touchscreen is a bit more complicated. It involves creating a custom X Input Classifier (XIC) and using it to filter out the unwanted touches. Here are the steps:

1. Create a new XIC file using a text editor. For example, to create a file called "touchscreen.xic" in your home directory, you can use the following command:

2. Add the following code to the file, replacing [device ID] with the ID of your touchscreen device and [X and Y] with the coordinates of the portion that you want to disable:

3. Save and close the file.
4. Load the XIC file using the following command:

This will create a new input master called "Custom Touchscreen" and load the XIC file. The portion of the touchscreen that you want to disable should now be disabled.

Re-enabling the Touchscreen

To re-enable the touchscreen or the portion of the touchscreen that you have disabled, use the following commands:

• Identify the touchscreen device using the xinput command
• Disable the touchscreen device using the xinput disable [device ID] command
• Disable a portion of the touchscreen by creating a custom XIC file and loading it using the xinput create-input-master and xinput load-xim-rules commands
• Re-enable the touchscreen or the portion of the touchscreen using the xinput enable [device ID] and xinput unload-xim-rules "Custom Touchscreen" commands

References

• Ubuntu Wiki: X/InputCoordinateTransformation
• Libinput: Touchscreen
• Manpage: xinput