I am having a thinkpad R60 model. I was using it with WindowsXP and It is very easy for me to scroll thorugh documents my holding the middle mouse button and the tracker together. But when I moved to ubuntu I found that the Scroll button was functioning in a weird manner. In some applications like Document viewer I was able to drag the pages using this key combination. In some applications like OpenOffice Writer whenever I press this key combination it pasted the text in the clipboard on to the cursor, annoying me. I googled a bit a found a resource which insisted on adding the below lines to /etc/X11/xorg.conf
Section “InputDevice”
Identifier “Configured Mouse”
Driver “mouse”
Option “CorePointer”
Option “Device” “/dev/input/mice”
Option “Protocol” “ExplorerPS/2″
Option “ZAxisMapping” “4 5″
Option “Emulate3Buttons” “true”
Option “EmulateWheel” “true”
Option “EmulateWheelButton” “2″
EndSection
When I added these lines to the files and restarted X, my display crashed. I had to go into recovery mode to configure X again to bring my display back. The recovery process is automatic, It just needs our confirmation to proceed with reconfiguring X so, nothing to worry when something goes wrong while editing the file. We can get back the default values.
Ubuntu Intrepid uses a improved XOrg which supports hot plug. To configure any devices we have to place a xml file containing the configurations into the directory /etc/hal/fdi/policy. To enable scrolling using the middle button in Thinkpad, open a terminal and enter the following commands.
- cd /etc/hal/fdi/policy
- sudo vi tp-scroll.fdi
- Paste the following into the file and save it.
<match key=”info.product” string=”TPPS/2 IBM TrackPoint”>
<merge key=”input.x11_options.EmulateWheel” type=”string”>true</merge>
<merge key=”input.x11_options.EmulateWheelButton” type=”string”>2</merge>
<merge key=”input.x11_options.XAxisMapping” type=”string”>6 7</merge>
<merge key=”input.x11_options.YAxisMapping” type=”string”>4 5</merge>
<merge key=”input.x11_options.ZAxsisMapping” type=”string”>4 5</merge>
<merge key=”input.x11_options.Emulate3Buttons” type=”string”>true</merge>
</match>
Now log out and log in, the scroll button should function as it would in WindowsXp.
Tags: scroll mouse, Thinkpad, ubuntu
