Scrolling with Thinkpad’s Trackpoint in BackTrack

One of the beautiful features of a Thinkpad : Scrolling using middle button and trackpoint, is missing out of the box on BackTrack 4. Here is how you enable it.

Based on Ubuntu bug 282387 , you need to patch xserver-xorg

add source repos for the /etc/apt/sources.list

deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ intrepid main restricted
deb-src http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ intrepid main restricted

and then issue these commands to patch

apt-get update
cd /tmp
apt-get install build-essential git-core
apt-get build-dep xserver-xorg-input-evdev
git clone git://git.freedesktop.org/git/xorg/driver/xf86-input-evdev
cd xf86-input-evdev
git reset --hard 5f2c8a2dcdf98b39997ee5e7c9a9ace3b640bfa3
./autogen.sh --prefix=/usr
make
make install

Once its patched, you need to add entry in fdi policy

nano /etc/hal/fdi/policy/mouse-wheel.fdi

and paste this in there

<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>

now reboot your machine and everything should be working.

You can further customize the trackpoint behavior by downloading and installing the trackpoint tool from here
It appears under System > Configure Trackpoint
Based on: This original post


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This entry was posted on Sunday, February 7th, 2010 at 2:12 pm and is filed under BackTrack. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.