Disable touchscreen in Android x86?

Question

I'm running a triple-boot between Android, Ubuntu, and Windows. My computer has a bad touchscreen that is randomly clicking certain areas of the screen, and I want to know if it's possible to disable the touchscreen driver. I have Android set up to boot via grub2. (Note that I never attempted to install Android on the machine itself, I installed it to a USB drive on virtualbox then copied the android system folder to Ubuntu's partition, then modified my 40_custom file so I can boot Android.)

The Android version I'm running is 5.1. I installed this because Android 6 didn't seem to boot in Virtualbox so I thought it probably wouldn't boot on my PC. (Apparently it seemed to softlock on boot inside Virtualbox.)

Answer 1

Sounds like your original problem is not specific to Android, and you're making this an XY problem.

What you should really do is unhook the touchscreen cable, and that solves it for all 3 operating systems.

On the laptops I've worked on, the ribbon cables for the screen are detachable from both ends: behind the LCD panel, and on the motherboard. Find out which is easiest to get to on your laptop by searching for disassembly videos, or just by removing screws until you get to it.

If this is an Android-specific problem for you, you'll want to take a look at /dev/input/event0 and event1 and event2 and so on.

Figure out which event corresponds to your touchscreen by using the getevent -i command from a shell terminal to read the descriptions, and getevent without the -i to track all inputs, touches, accelerometer movements, etc. in live action to narrow down which event is touchscreen. I have not verified this, but you might be able to disable the culprit driver by changing permissions on the eventXXXXX file to read-only with a root file browser.