How to Disable the Touchscreen in Linux Mint

This web page is to document how I solved a problem with my old ASUS S200E/X202EV VivoBook which may help others. What happened was, the touch screen developed a fault where the digitizer (the touch sensitive element of the screen) was behaving as if someone was touching it when they wern't, causing all sorts of strange things to happen. As I don't really use the touch screen very often, not to mention all the fingerprints that accumulate on the glossy surface when I do, I decided to disable it. Unfortunately, in Linux Mint there isn't a graphical user interface for this function, but it can be done using the terminal. So, open the terminal (Start Menu > Applications > System Tools > Terminal) and type in 'xinput' (highlighted below) then enter. This will list all the input devices, one of which will be the digitizer which in my particular laptop is named 'Atmel Atmel maXTouch Digitizer'. This has an identifier which in this case is id=11. The name of the digitizer and its id number will be different for other makes and models of laptop

Next in the terminal, type 'xinput disable 11' (highlighted below) then enter. The touchscreen will now be disabled

But not for long, because when the laptop is next rebooted the touch screen will be enabled again! This is easily fixed by adding the 'xinput disable 11' command to the application start list. So, go to Start Menu > Applications > Preferences > Startup Applications where a window will open as shown below. Click the 'Add' button

Fill in the details as below and click 'Save'

Now there is an entry in the Startup Programs list to run the command automatically when the laptop boots up. Job done!