IBM / Lenovo Thinkpad Trackpoint Scroll

If tou, like me, use a thinkpad, and are addicted to the efficiency gained by not having to move your hands away from the keyboard to scroll a page, or use the cumbersom scrollbars on webpages and other apps, you’d like to know how to configure this behavior in Linux, right?

The advent of Udev and HAL in modern Linux distributions makes changes to xorg.conf pretty much obsolete. Instead you interface with the hardware through different configuration files in HAL and Udev, respectively.

If you’re using a modern distribution, you can follow this:

To enable vertical scrolling with the middle trackpoint button, create the file /etc/hal/fdi/policy/mouse-wheel.fdi as root with the following content:

<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.YAxisMapping” type=”string”>4 5</merge>

<merge key=”input.x11_options.XAxisMapping” type=”string”>6 7</merge>

<merge key=”input.x11_options.Emulate3Buttons” type=”string”>true</merge>

<merge key=”input.x11_options.EmulateWheelTimeout” type=”string”>200</merge>

</match>

Do a reboot, and your Trackpoint should work as expected.

You might also want to disable the trackpad (the one that always annoys you when writing, or laying on the couch with the ThinkPad in an upright position), so that when you work, you use either the trackpoint only, or an external mouse via USB or the likes.

If you are using Gnome, you could fine-tune the trackpoint with an application like this:

http://tpctl.sourceforge.net/configure-trackpoint.html