Wouldn't you know that I wrote all the stuff below and then found a great answer here: http://www.bernawebdesign.ch/byteblog/2010/10/14/ubuntu-10-10-maverick-meerkat-on-eeepc-1005-ha/ That's better than I hoped for -- it turns off the tapping functionality of the pad, which is really what I needed. The pad always works to move the mouse and clicking the buttons still works, but tapping the pad does nothing, so I can't accidentally move the cursor while typing in emacs, say. I think I was sometimes pasting by tapping -- not sure how (could it be ctrl-tap?), but that was often a real nightmare. I tested the script and it's working. I might try to bind it to a button or to Fn-F3, but that hardly matters to me. I think I'm OK with leaving it in the tap-off state all the time. This means I can use my netbook without screaming. It's great having this community with people who share their excellent code and help so many of us. I just linked the script to the little silver key. It works. It wasn't too hard to do, but the trick was to first *search* for "keyboard shortcuts", then add the full path to the script, save, highlight the new line (under Custom Shortcuts), press the little silver key, close. I guess the little silver key is called "XF86Tools". (Of course you have to save the script and make it executable.) Another point: I was using Netbook Remix, but with 10.10 it looks like they've done away with that and replaced it with something else. Something I don't like as much. In fact, I would say that with 10.10, I found nothing better and many things worse. It also lost some of my settings, like not automatically maximizing new windows -- now they are maximizing again. What I was going to say: I love this little netbook, but there's one thing that makes me crazy: The touchpad is very close to the space bar and it's really impossible to type comfortably without sometimes hitting the touchpad with the thumb. The consequences of this misake can be very disruptive and annoying. Does anybody here have a similar machine and know how to turn off the touchpad and turn it back on? I'm using Ubuntu 10.10, now, but was using 9.10 and 10.04 before this and could never get Fn-F3 to toggle touch pad on/off consistently. It used to turn it off (in 10.04, Netbook Remix, I think), but then it would turn itself back on pretty quickly. There is also a silver button on the top left side of the keyboard that is supposed to turn off the touchpad. It does nothing, but man, that would be fantastic if it worked. Mike