Eddie Monge Jr.

Ok since Ubuntu made a change in how the touchpad scroll works in 8.10 and up, I figured I would make a new post describing how to fix the scrolling region. Well mainly its for me when I reinstall Ubuntu, well Linux Mint actually since thats my current flavor of Nix. I reinstall the OS quite often. Ok this will be quick and simple.

This is a fix for the problem where the right scroll region is too large. On my laptop, a Gateway MX6930, the right scroll region extends past the physical separator of my touchpad. It takes up about half the touch pad making it difficult to navigate the computer.

Use this post http://www.eddiemonge.com/wp-admin/post.php?action=edit&post=59 to get the right scrolling region.

Type the following command into a terminal prompt (make sure you have vim installed. You do have vim installed right?)

sudo vim /etc/hal/fdi/policy/vertscroll.fdi

Once in vim you should have a blank screen with a blinking cursor. Hit ‘i’ to be able to insert text. Copy and paste the following code into the terminal. The number 5970 is for my Gateway MX6930. If you got a different value using the above linked post, then put that in instead.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<deviceinfo version="0.2">
 <device>
  <match key="input.x11_driver" string="synaptics">
   <merge key="input.x11_options.RightEdge" type="string">5970</merge>
  </match>
 </device>
</deviceinfo>

After you have pasted it in, press the ESC key, then type ‘:wq’ (make sure to include the colon to be able to enter commands). This will write the text to the file then exit it.

After vim closes, restart the computer. Upon restart, the right scroll region should now be fixed.

Thanks to the Ubuntu forums located at http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=970277 for this invaluable help.

Update for this article is now up at /*** http://www.eddiemonge.com/2009/07/02/scrolling-area…ng-ubuntu-8-10 ***/ It has been updated for version of Ubuntu including and greater than 8.10 and derivatives.

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:

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