If you're like me and love your nipple, you might prefer to disable the touchpad on your ThinkPad.

In openSUSE this is a trivial affair of opening up the Gnome mouse preferences and unchecking the Enable Touchpad option. When I went searching for this option in Ubuntu 10.04 I couldn't find it, so I searched the Ubuntu Software Centre for "touchpad" and installed GSynaptics, which looked very similar to openSUSE's tool.

GSynaptics disabled the touchpad just fine - until the machine transitioned power state, such as suspend/resume or a reboot. I've found that the reliable way of disabling the touchpad in Gnome is to fire up gconf-editor and locate a setting similar to the following and disable it: