XPS 13 9333 touchpad won't turn off

I had the same problem on my Asus F5N laptop since Ubuntu 11.10 and nothing had changed in this regard. Synaptics touchpad is still poorly supported on Ubuntu. As a workaround to disable touchpad while typing I issue the "syndaemon -i 1 -K -d" command. Actually, I put this line into my /etc/rc.local file. Of course the "disable touchpad while typing" checkbox in system settings still has no effect. This bug continues into Ubuntu 14.04. My guess would be that synclient may not work correctly since shared memory is disabled for security reasons. I used to enable SHM option in /etc/X11/xorg.conf but now the appropriate place is to edit the XML file which I cannot recall on top of my head. Hope this helps.

Ok, I figured out why the "disable touchpad while typing" feature doesn't work. It has nothing to do with this.

On newer kernels / xorg, the keyboard lags terribly on the 9333 model, delaying keypresses by up to about .5 second or more. This means that syndaemon (which watches for keypresses and turns the touchpad off) cannot receive a keypress until after the touchpad has already gone haywire due to your palm being close to it. Thus, typing on the 9333 unit is essentially impossible.

In Ubuntu 12.04 this doesn't happen, though the system is still very flaky due to lack of palm detection etc. I'm not really sure what TouchpadOff is actually supposed to do in this context, so it might not be a bug. You can disable the input device using xinput.

Hi, I have this same issue on my DELL XPS 13 (model:9343). Please let me know if there is a workaround until this issue if fixed

I have the same problem on a Dell Inspiron 14. syndaemon just won't disable the touchpad while typing, no matter what I do.
Running syndaemon in verbose mode shows that it does actually try to enable and disable the touchpad but nothing happens.
I think it might be related to the fact that there are two touchpads in this laptop as reported by xinput:

$ xinput list
⎡ Virtual core pointer id=2 [master pointer (3)]
⎜ ↳ Virtual core XTEST pointer id=4 [slave pointer (2)]
⎜ ↳ DLL063E:00 06CB:2934 id=11 [slave pointer (2)]
⎜ ↳ SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad id=13 [slave pointer (2)]
⎣ Virtual core keyboard id=3 [master keyboard (2)]
    ↳ Virtual core XTEST keyboard id=5 [slave keyboard (3)]
    ↳ Power Button id=6 [slave keyboard (3)]
    ↳ Video Bus id=7 [slave keyboard (3)]
    ↳ Power Button id=8 [slave keyboard (3)]
    ↳ Sleep Button id=9 [slave keyboard (3)]
    ↳ Integrated_Webcam_HD id=10 [slave keyboard (3)]
    ↳ AT Translated Set 2 keyboard id=12 [slave keyboard (3)]
    ↳ Dell WMI hotkeys id=14 [slave keyboard (3)]

Presumably syndaemon is disabling the SynPS/2 device while the actual touchpad is the DLL063E:00 device. Funnily enough enough the "Mouse and Touchpad" settings works on the right device.

For what it's worth manually configuring the trackpad behavior via gpointing-device-settings seems to work. Unfortunately the settings for some reason aren't persistent. I have to manually reset after each reboot.

As Lars already mentioned, the problem seems to stem from the two input devices. Disabling the second Touchpad helps working around this bug. This can be done in X11 settings:

sudo vi /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/51-synaptics-quirks.conf

# Disable generic Synaptics device, as we're using
# "DLLxxxx:xx 06CB:xxxx Touchpad"
# Having multiple touchpad devices running confuses syndaemon
Section "InputClass"
        Identifier "SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad"
        MatchProduct "SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad"
        MatchIsTouchpad "on"
        MatchOS "Linux"
        MatchDevicePath "/dev/input/event*"
        Option "Ignore" "on"
EndSection