Friday, September 24, 2010

Thinkpad T510 laptops mouse/touchpad issues with Ubuntu v10.04

There have been 2 problems that I've observed with using Ubuntu Lucid v10.04 with the Thinkpad T510. The first is that the Synaptics touchpad seems to cause accidental scrolls and button clicks. The second is that the middle trackpoint doesn't work out of the box.

For the first issue, this link first clue me into the possible issue:
http://www.paralaptop.com/tag/ibm-thinkpad-t510-mouse-problems
Actually there is simple solution to fix the problem of T500 touchpad messing up while typing. What you need is just pressing Fn + F8 keys on your T500 laptop. There you should see any setting you can use to manage the system. Looking for the touchpad option and choose to only enable the touchpoint and disable the touchpad. This method is works fine whether on Lenovo T500 or T400 laptop.

Hitting Fn + F8 must be done after each reboot, so one way would be to install the gpointing-device-settings package (sudo apt-get install gpointing-device-settings) and then selecting the "Touchpad off" option:

http://www.andrewferrier.com/blog/2010/06/04/disabling-synaptics-touchpad-with-ubuntu-10-04/

For the record, I tried only to disable the vertical/horizontal scrolling checkboxes to no avail. It seems that the touchpad should be disabled if you're using the pointer device.

Another thing: the middle button does not work for scrolling without extra changes:

http://psung.blogspot.com/2010/04/thinkpad-trackpoint-scrolling-in-ubuntu.html

Create a new file /usr/lib/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-thinkpad.conf with the following contents:

Section "InputClass"
    Identifier "Trackpoint Wheel Emulation"
    MatchProduct "TrackPoint"
    MatchDevicePath "/dev/input/event*"
    Driver "evdev"
    Option "EmulateWheel" "true"
    Option "EmulateWheelButton" "2"
    Option "Emulate3Buttons" "false"
    Option "XAxisMapping" "6 7"
    Option "YAxisMapping" "4 5"
EndSection
Then restart X11 (or it may be easier to reboot).

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