Sunday 24 October 2010

IBM ThinkPad X60S Middle Mouse Button

Every time a new release of Ubuntu linux comes out, something breaks.   Fortunately over time the somethings are becoming less and less significant!
This time it was the middle mouse button on my IBM ThinkPad X60S.    I had got it working following the instructions here in version 10.04 - it just needed a configuration file in /usr/lib/X11/xorg.conf.d.
But it stopped working following the upgrade to Ubuntu 10.10.
It turns out that the xorg.conf.d location has changed to /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d.
Putting a file named 20-thinkpad.conf in that directory with the following contents got middle button scrolling working nicely again!
Section "InputClass"
Identifier "Trackpoint Wheel Emulation"
MatchProduct "TPPS/2 IBM TrackPoint|DualPoint Stick|Synaptics Inc. Composite 
TouchPad / TrackPoint"
MatchDevicePath "/dev/input/event*"
Option "EmulateWheel" "true"
Option "EmulateWheelButton" "2"
Option "Emulate3Buttons" "false"
Option "XAxisMapping" "6 7"
Option "YAxisMapping" "4 5"
EndSection
 There is talk that it should work by doing:
sudo apt-get install gpointing-device-settings

But it did not work for me (at least not just like that - tried re-starting xwindows, but still no scrolling - maybe there is some configuration needed, but I like the old way of dropping a file into a configuration directory!

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