Okay, so it may mean my typing posture is out of line but even so, it can be incredibly annoying if your thumb just happens to hit the touchpad on your laptop while you're typing.

I'm using a Lenovo Thinkpad T400 which has a synaptics based touchpad. This fix only works if you're using a synaptics based touchpad! If you're not using a synaptic touchpad then this fix probably won't work for you.

First off, we need to edit our xorg.conf at /etc/X11/xorg.conf. I appended the following to my file since I had not Mouse based input device section:

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Section "InputDevice"
Identifier  "Touchpad"
Driver "synaptics"
Option "Device" "/dev/psaux"
Option "Protocol" "auto-dev"
Option "SHMConfig" "on"
EndSection

if you have an input device section then you'll need to ensure it features the same Option and Driver lines as above.

Once you've made these changes you'll need to restart the X server. You can do this using

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/etc/init.d/gdm restart

or alternatively kill the X server using ctrl+alt+backspace and let gdm bring it back up. BEFORE we restart the X server, let's setup a tapping delay. I created a xinitrc file at ~/.xinitrc and put the following in it:

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pgrep syndaemon > /dev/null && killall syndaemon
syndaemon -i 0.5 -d

You can experiment with different delays once you've restarted your X server by executing the two lines above from within your .xinitrc (or simply re-execute ~/.xinitrc). Half a second turned out to be the perfect delay for me but it's entirely down to your own preferences.

Have fun!