I own an old Dell Inspiron 4000 laptop whose trackstick / trackpoint (the blue little joystick in the middle of the keyboard) has become really annoying : typing on the keyboard, or even touching the surface of the laptop generate parasite movements of the pointer.
I've looked for a way to disable it, and found one way using hal (since X is auto-configured in Ubuntu now), by adding the following file as /etc/hal/fdi/policy/10-disabletrackstick.fdi :
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<deviceinfo version="0.2">
<device>
<match key="info.product" contains="TPPS/2 IBM TrackPoint">
<remove key="input.x11_driver"/>
</match>
</device>
</deviceinfo>
Thanks to this post by Brice Goglin for he hint on how to disable a device.
