The Ramblings of a Fosgnilbmareht

I reinstalled Ubuntu on my laptop recently because certain issues with my Vista install made me not want to trust it. I have had Ubuntu installed before on my laptop, but not for a few months. I really like Linux but need Windows sometimes for those few apps that don’t work too well in Wine. Overall, I have been happy with Linux on my laptop, with a few notable exceptions including:

• Can’t adjust the brightness on my laptop (will look into a fix later)
• Touchpad vertical scroll area was way too big. My laptop has a spot on the Touchpad dedicated to scrolling and Ubuntu recognized this, but doubled its size so it was on the other side of the line also
• Not as easy to connect a phone as a modem as it is in Windows. Windows it is literally plug and play. Linux has not been so easy

The first and third issues I will work out, if I can, but I felt the second one was a priority since at times my screen would scroll instead of moving the mouse around like I wanted it to. These are the steps I followed to fix this:

Really, you only need to do 2 things if you have a Gateway MX69xx series laptop but I will give all the steps from A to Z for everyone’s benefit.

1. Enable SHMConfig in your xorg.conf to enable vertical scrolling.
   1. Open a terminal (Applications -> Accessories -> Terminal)
   2. Edit your xorg conifguration (XServer config) by typing:
      sudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf
      Or if you are on a non-Ubuntu system, type
      su
      followed by your password, and then the gedit line from above without the sudo part.
   3. Find the section “InputDevice” with the Identifier “Synaptics Touchpad”
   4. Enter this line :
      Option “SHMConfig” “on”
   5. Make sure to save and close anything you have open
   6. Press Control + Alt + Backspace to restart your XServer
2. After logging back in, open a terminal and su or sudo again and type
   apt-get install gsynaptics
3. After this finishes installing, go to System -> Preferences -> Touchpad
4. Click the Scrolling tab
5. Check the box that says Vertical Scrolling
6. Open a terminal and type
   synclient -m 1
   This will give you an output of the coordinates of the area on your Touchpad that you are touching.  You want to pay attention to the second and/or third numbers. The second number is the X coordinate. The third number is the Y coordinate, if you want to do this process for horizontal scrolling.
7. Move your finger around on the Touchpad until you determine the right edge of where you want the scroll area to begin/end. Take note of the X coordinate.
8. Press Control + C to stop the output.
9. Type
   synclient RightEdge=number
   where number equals the x coordinate from above. So for my Gateway MX6900, I typed
   synclient RightEdge=5970
10. Test out your scrolling area. If you aren’t happy with the results, change the synclient line above testing different values. If you are happy with the results, go to the next step.
11. The change made to synclient is temporary. To make the change permanent, you will have to add the value to your xorg configuration. Follow the steps above to open your xorg.conf and add this line in the same section:
    Option “RightEdge” “number”
    where number is the number from step 9.
12. Save and close the file
13. Restart XServer again
14. Enjoy your new scroll area.

Tags: Synaptics, Touchpad, Ubuntu, Vista, Wine, Xorg

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 3rd, 2008 at 10:20 am and is filed under Uncategorized. 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.