How to tune touchpad for smaller area?

It is very simple to accomplish this:

First discover the width and height of your touchpad typing in the terminal:

less /var/log/Xorg.0.log | grep -i range

In my case the output was this:

[    24.188] (--) synaptics: SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad: x-axis range 1472 - 5772
[    24.188] (--) synaptics: SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad: y-axis range 1408 - 5086

So the width is 5772 and the height is 5086. Now you can have a notion of the bottom area to disable, just try out values to get the desired area disabled. The command in the terminal is:

synclient AreaBottomEdge=**VALUE**(in my case 730)

That is all.

For me, doing this was not enough. I needed to let my thumb at the bottom of the touchpad (ready to click). Actually, the AreaBottomEdge don't disable the "finger counting" on the dead zone and resting your thumb enable the scroll. Quite annoying.

To fix that, I used this patch : http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=4v9JP2pe

Don't forget to change to the AreaBottomEdge value in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/10-synaptics.conf

Source : #24

Edit: by the way, the bug is referenced here : https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xserver-xorg-input-synaptics/+bug/1026046