IBM Thinkpad T40 trackpoint (pointing stick) misconfigured

[Greg Weber]

(1) The trackpoint pointing stick does not recognize when you press to select an item with stick itself.
(2) The trackpoint middle button does not let you scroll.

(1) The press to select feature of the trackpoint pointing stick can be enabled with the following command: 'echo -n 1 > /sys/devices/platform/i8042/serio1/serio2/press_to_select'
(2) The scrolling feature of the trackpoint middle button can be enabled by adding some lines to /etc/X11/xorg.config .

[Greg Weber (gregweber)]

(2) The scrolling feature of the trackpoint middle button can be enabled by adding some lines to /etc/X11/xorg.config under.
'
       Option "EmulateWheel" "on"
       Option "EmulateWheelButton" "2"
       Option "XAxisMapping" "6 7"
'

[Greg Weber (gregweber)]

Correction:
/etc/X11/xorg.conf
instead of:
/etc/X11/xorg.config
Please excuse the mistake.

[Greg Weber (gregweber)]

Here is a link to more information
http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/How_to_configure_the_TrackPoint

[Sebastian Urban (surban)]

Confirming on Intrepid with latest updates.

As xorg.conf has been deprecated there should be no need to edit it anymore. Please add a configuration option to the GNOME mouse configuration panel to enable TrackPoint middle button scrolling and TrackPoint press to click.

[Sebastian Urban (surban)]

This probably also applies to all other ThinkPads with TrackPoints.

[Ian Weisser (ian-weisser)]

Marking confirmed. Package xorg

[Philipp Dreimann (philipp-dreimann-deactivatedaccount)]

Is there any solution available to enable the scrolling again in intrepid?!

Its a serious issue for me and I think also for any other TrackPoint (not only ThinkPad?!) user.

[Niklas Vanhainen (niklas-vanhainen)]

I have an X61 Tablet and had the same problem.
Copy the attached file to /etc/hal/fdi/policy
For some reason though it stops working after I resume from suspend.

[Niklas Vanhainen (niklas-vanhainen)]

For the above to work, you have to restart hal with /etc/init.d/hal restart and restart X.

[Sebastian Urban (surban)]

On Wed, 2008-10-22 at 17:10 +0000, Niklas Vanhainen wrote:
> I have an X61 Tablet and had the same problem.
> Copy the attached file to /etc/hal/fdi/policy
> For some reason though it stops working after I resume from suspend.
>
> ** Attachment added: "mouse-wheel.fdi"
> http://launchpadlibrarian.net/18801118/mouse-wheel.fdi
>

How does the attachment work? There is no reference to ThinkPad in it.

[Salze (stefan-sarzio)]

The above changes do not work on my x40.

I would like a configuration option for KDE.

[Niklas Vanhainen (niklas-vanhainen)]

Sebastian:
Download and look at it, it's XML and is parsed by your browser, so it'll look weird.
It's essentially the same settings that was previously used for the xorg, just in a different format, passed to HAL.

[Sebastian Urban (surban)]

The fix does not work on my ThinkPad R61. Mouse stops moving when middle button is pressed, but window is not scrolled either.

[Sebastian Urban (surban)]

The attached file works on my notebook.

[zerny (zerny)]

I can confirm this on a ThinkPad X60. Following the description at http://psung.blogspot.com/2008/09/scrolling-with-thinkpads-trackpoint-in.html fixed the scrolling issues.

It would be great to see this setup by default.

[Pieter Hintjens (ph-imatix)]

This fix works. Now, if I can find out why the backlight does not come back on after a resume, and why X randomly dies (and restarts, causing all work to be lost), my X40 will be as good as it was under Heron.

Thanks for this fix, Niklas.

[Christian (tschanzc)]

The .fdi fix does not work on my X200 (ubuntu 8.10). Is there another way to fix this?

[Sebastian Urban (surban)]

I was able to get TrackPoint scrolling to work with the .fdi file.

However, it stops working after a suspend/resume cycle. Has somebody an idea how to fix this?

[JonasL (jonas.lieb)]

http://tpctl.sourceforge.net/configure-trackpoint.html
This tool should help configuring the trackpoint.
Worked for me.

[Ryley (ryleyb)]

.fdi file fixes scrolling.

After suspend/resume, this is a brute force solution to get it going again:

sudo rmmod psmouse && sudo modprobe psmouse

As described here (with a more permanent version of this fix too):

http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/How_to_configure_the_TrackPoint#Reactivate_Scrolling_after_suspend.2Fresume