26 September 2008

Scrolling with the Thinkpad’s TrackPoint in Ubuntu

Update: note, these instructions work for me on Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid as well as 9.04 Jaunty and 9.10 Karmic on a Thinkpad X61s. Alternatively, the Karmic repos have gpointing-device-settings, a GUI tool for enabling trackpoint scrolling (as well as other special trackpoint/touchpad features).

Ubuntu GNU/Linux 8.10 (Intrepid) switches to evdev for X server input, which has the unfortunate side effect of breaking old EmulateWheel configurations. So scrolling using the middle button + TrackPoint (which I absolutely love) was broken for a while, although it is now fixed. Instead of modifying your xorg.conf, create a new file called /etc/hal/fdi/policy/mouse-wheel.fdi with the following contents:

<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.ZAxisMapping" type="string">4 5</merge>
 <merge key="input.x11_options.Emulate3Buttons" type="string">true</merge>
</match>

(Based on code from Michael Vogt and adapted to support both vertical and horizontal scrolling.)

Update: you’ll have to restart hal and gdm, and remove the cache file /var/cache/hald/fdi-cache, for the changes to take effect. Log in on a VT (e.g. with Ctrl+Alt+F1) and then do:

sudo rm /var/cache/hald/fdi-cache
sudo /etc/init.d/hal restart
sudo /etc/init.d/gdm restart

(Be sure to log in on a console/VT, because restarting GDM will kill all your X apps…)

これで、センターボタンの挙動がなおった。

ふむ。なかなかよい。