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Mike Reed asks: QuestionHello. I have this 12” G4 iBook and the trackpad button is broken. Specifically it appears to be stuck on “click”. I looked at what it takes to replace and it seems I’d need to replace the entire upper-case of the iBook. As a compromise I’m prepared to plug in and use an external USB mouse and use the option to ignore trackpad when external mouse is present. But here’s my problem – I can’t use an external mouse yet because that also can’t click because the trackpad click won’t ever finish and unregister and allow another device a click. So if I could set the Keyboard & Mouse Trackpad option ‘Ignore trackpad when mouse is present’ using the terminal (which I can launch using Spotlight) this iBook would become a useable system again. (In case you’re wondering I’m typing this from my MacBook and the iBook belongs to my son who recently broke the trackpad clicker during a bout of computer rage. I haven’t quite worked out what drove him so mad, OS X is usually so serene!) AnswerAh, now that’s a curious problem. Since the pad is stuck down, you can’t click on the setting since the system essentially merges input from the trackpad and any attached pointing device. So you must manually change the preference. Normally, I’d say boot it to TDM and then boot another machine off of it, but you’re describing having a PPC Mac and an Intel Mac, so that won’t work (beyond the architecture change, the disk is of the wrong partition type). So we really do have to go manually changing this setting. You still need to put the iBook in TDM and mount it on the MacBook Pro, but the MBP should be turned on and running when you do it. Next, open Terminal on the MBP and move into the main user’s home directory on the iBook and then into Library/Preferences after that, similar to this: cd /Volumes/TheiBook/Users/bob/Library/Preferences/ Now after some poking around, I found that the setting the pane is changing is in the .GlobalPreferences.plist file. Toggle the setting like so: defaults write .GlobalPreferences com.apple.mouse.ignoreTrackpadIfMousePresent -bool true Reboot the iBook and if it’s set to auto-login, the issue should be resolved, though you might have to click the mouse a couple of times.
About Adam Knight
 Author Biography Adam Knight is one of the founders of Mac Geekery and is a geek at heart. Programmer by day, hacker by night, his daily life revolves around the Macintosh platform, which he has been a user and programmer for since the early days of System 7 when his LCII replaced his Apple //c. In-between tech jobs, he’s managed to learn the basics of any web hacker: PHP, MySQL, Perl, Apache, Linux, *BSD, and the intricacies of ./configure —prefix=~/bombshelter/. Today, codepoet is concentrating on blogging again, writing some software for the Mac by himself (including Notae) and for his company (such as Switchblade) and has a few other toys coming out soon. Bug him over AIM or email [link fixed]. |
For anyone without access to the acronym hash in Adam’s Brain, TDM = Target Disk Mode.
Seems to me since Mike can launch the Terminal on the iBook, he ought to be able to run the defaults command directly, without the need to mount the iBook remotely in Target Disk Mode.
How do you open Terminal if you can’t use the mouse or type? As long as the mouse button is stuck down it won’t accept keypresses. Single User Mode might, though.
He said he was able to launch Terminal via Spotlight, so apparently the system does accept keypresses even if the mouse button is held down. After a quick test on my Powerbook, the trick is to be sure not to touch the trackpad at all to prevent it from attempting a drag operation.
He said he was able to launch the Terminal.app via SpotLight. Sounds to me like the keyboard is functional.
Terminal works for me if i hold the mouse key down. Accepts keyboard input and responds just fine.
What about Single User Mode? That doesn’t need the trackpad at all.