Hi!, I also wanted to disable the touchpad on my ThinkPad, and even though I had disabled it in the BIOS, it was still working in X11. I ended up doing exactly what rpv suggested.
I changed the following setting from 0
to 1
to disable mouse movement:
hw.synaptics.movement_enable=1
And I also changed the default value for finger_high
from 35
to 100
to disable tap-to-click:
there
sysctl -w hw.synaptics.finger_high=100
I gradually increased that value until I found the point where taps no longer triggered a click.
Finally, to make the changes persistent, I added them to /etc/sysctl.conf
.