How do I keep one of my mouse drivers from loading?

[Eroberer]

The problem: I do not want my Synaptec Touchpad on my Dell laptop to work (ever). In Windows, I have the thing disabled and I use one of my other two mousing options. In Linux, there does not seem to be a graphical interface to disable the annoying mouse, and so I would love to know another way of doing this. I would certainly like it if I could disable the auto-detection of this mouse (but not all of my other hardware), or if the driver could just not be loaded at all. I guess if I have to go run the same commands every time to disable this mouse, that's just fine too. I've searched all over the net for an answer on how to disable hardware (in general), and I just can't get any leads, thus my very first question on here. =)

I do almost all of my programming in Linux, and my problem with the TouchPad is that whenever I'm smacking around on the keyboard, my palm will sometimes accidentally touch it and move the typing cursor all of a sudden and I get very angry as result.

Thank you very much in advance for any help!

FYI, I have Fedora Core 4, and really any help in disabling hardware would be much appreciated!

[Eroberer]

Alright guys, I know it's not as exotic of a problem as some of the others around here, but this is really bugging me. I tried one thing from a recent thread around here, and it did NOT work. I ran "serviceconf" and disabled kudzu from running, and I found /etc/sysconfig/hwconf and deleted the entry for my Synaptec Touchpad. However, the touchpad starts up and it as annoying as ever even after a reboot.

Any ideas? Thanks in advance!

[jspaar]

I'm pretty sure the Synaptics driver is handled by the ps2 mouse driver, which is compiled into the Fedora kernel. So I'm betting you'll need to rebuild the kernel with CONFIG_MOUSE_PS2=n.

Or build with CONFIG_MOUSE_PS2=m, and then add an alias to modprobe.conf to prevent loading that module:
alias psmouse off

This will also prevent you from using any other PS/2 mouse of course. Anyway, it's an idea. ;)

[Eroberer]

Hah! Well, if my rebuild kernel with CONFIG_MOUSE_PS2=n you mean tape a piece of paper of the damn thing, I'm done.

I think you're right, though, that the TouchPad is just handled by the PS2 business, but I would still love to figure out a way to disable this thing without rebuilding kernels so that no PS2 mice work. ANY IDEAS, ANYBODY?!?

[imdeemvp]

Easy, do what I do.....TURN IT OFF!

[Eroberer]

How do I "turn it off"? I don't know of any hardware managers that'll do that easily. The stupid Touchpad is embedded, so there's no power switch for it. So how do I get it to turn off?