Via Lifehacker I got to this Ubuntuforum thread and in a matter of minutes fixed a problem that kept me away from using my laptop touchpad.
It’s pretty common in fact that you accidentally bump on the it while typing, and that means the cursor will randomly move, eventually selecting some text or moving your caret lines away from the point you are typing.

I expecially found this follow-up useful – in fact there were no Synaptics stanzas in my xorg.conf (everything was going through /dev/input/mice) – so I had to create one for Synaptics replacing the generic one.

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