disabling that touchpad

Here's a way to disable a touchpad in Linux via the command line (tip found here).

To get a list of connected modules, I ran

$ xinput list

From the output, I found the id number for the touchpad ("id-14"), then ran:

$ xinput set-prop 14 "Device Enabled" 0

If I want to re-enable the touchpad, I can simply run the xinput set-prop command with "Device Enabled" 1 instead of "Device Enabled" 0.

That's it! Thanks, Jonquil!