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# [Simon Greenwood](https://simongreenwood.me.uk/)

Gracefully degrading

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# Disabling a Wacom laptop touchscreen in an Arch Linux based OS

Posted on Tue 22 August 2023 in [Technical](https://simongreenwood.me.uk/category/technical.html)

## (Without disabling everything else)

My main laptop is a [Lenovo X1 Yoga 2nd Gen](https://www.lenovo.com/gb/en/p/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpadx1/x1-yoga-2nd-generation/22tp2txx12y) running [Manjaro KDE Plasma](https://manjaro.org/download/). Lovely machine and does what I want it to do. As a Yoga device, it has a touchscreen, which I don't use a lot and have often thought of disabling.

The other day, the laptop had the wrong kind of drop, which has cracked the touchscreen in the corner. This hasn't affected the display at all but has messed up the touchscreen input so that it keeps getting random signals that trigger events, which was sufficiently intrusive to need to turn off the touchscreen

The first thing I found was [this from the Manjaro Forum](https://forum.manjaro.org/t/deactivating-the-touchscreen-pen-of-a-convertible-laptop/121390/6). Tl;dr, disable the module that powers the touchscreen with `sudo modprobe -r usbhid` and make it permanent by creating a blacklist at `/etc/modprobe.d/blacklist/wacom` that contains the following:

```
blacklist wacom
blacklist usbhid

```

and restart.

This worked fine when just on the laptop, but I have a multi-monitor desktop setup that has a USB mouse and keyboard, and when I came to start work this morning, neither worked. Enabling `usbhid` in the blacklist just brought the spurious touches back.

There was going to be something that creates rules to selectively allow USB devices, and that something is [USBGuard](https://github.com/USBGuard/usbguard).

The [Arch Wiki](https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/USBGuard) documents it well, but basically install with `pacman -Sy usbguard` (or your software manager of choice), and create your ruleset as `root` with `usbguard generate-policy > /etc/usbguard/rules.conf`.

This lists all your connected devices as allowed, including the touchscreen:

```
allow id 056a:50b6 serial "" name "Pen and multitouch sensor" hash "B1HYEaAtN9VpnKbIK5GQeZFfg3XN7EAAeQUvTx5zIhk=" parent-hash "jEP/6WzviqdJ5VSeTUY8PatCNBKeaREvo2OqdplND/o=" via-port "1-10" with-interface { 03:00:00 03:00:00 } with-connect-type "not used"

```

To disable it, change `allow` to `block` to stop it being processed, or `reject` to stop the device being loaded at all. At the moment I have it set to `block`.

Start USBGuard with `systemctl start usbguard` and enable it on boot with `systemctl enable usbguard`.

This stopped the touchscreen responding but kept the USB keyboard and mouse working. I haven't tested it across a reboot yet but I can't see why it won't continue to work.

[tech](https://simongreenwood.me.uk/tag/tech.html) [laptop](https://simongreenwood.me.uk/tag/laptop.html) [linux](https://simongreenwood.me.uk/tag/linux.html) [manjaro](https://simongreenwood.me.uk/tag/manjaro.html) [touchscreen](https://simongreenwood.me.uk/tag/touchscreen.html) [hardware](https://simongreenwood.me.uk/tag/hardware.html)

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