Ubuntu 10.04 How to Setup Two Finger Scroll on Laptop Touch-Pad

I had to use a Macbook Pro for a while at work while and got hooked on the two finger scroll. Since I am a Linux junky and needed to find a method to enable this in for my Ubuntu latop. In the past I was able to go this by clicking a button under mouse settings. For some reason this was greyed out with Ubuntu 10.04. I found a couple things to try but none of them seemed to work for me. The following is what I did to get it working.

Note: This was done in Ubuntu 10.04. I have not tested this in any of the newer releases.

So what does this really do? The Two Finger scroll allows you to scroll down the page using two fingers on a laptop touch-pad instead of using one finger on the outside of the touch-pad like on many windows laptops.

 

 

Let's get down to creating are little script to get things working.

Click on Applications > Accessories > gedit text editor

 

 

Open Gedit: Applications > Accessories > Gedit Text Editor

 

 

You will now see this application

 

 

Gedit Opened

 

 

Now paste the follow lines of code in Gedit.

 

#!/bin/sh

synclient VertTwoFingerScroll=1

synclient HorizTwoFingerScroll=1

synclient EmulateTwoFingerMinW=5

synclient EmulateTwoFingerMinZ=48

 

 

Edit you file to look like this

 

 

Save the File as 2fsrl

(Note: You can name it what ever you want, just replace 2fsrl with the name of your file (Case Sensitive))

 

 

Gedit: File > Save

 

 

In the example I am saving 2fsrl in my home directory.

 

 

In the example I am saving the file in my home dir

 

 

We now have the the script, Now we just need to make it executable.

Open a terminal

Applications > Accessories > Terminal

 

 

Open A Terminal: Applications > Accessories > Terminal

 

 

If you just saved your file in your home dir all you have you do is just type the following command. If you saved it to another location and/or named the file something else you will need to adjust the command to fit your file name.

Enter the follwing command sudo chmod +x 2fsrl

sudo chmod +x 2fsrl

 

 

Make sure you are have change to the directory your file is in before entering this command

 

 

 

Now all we have to do is run the script.

Type or paste the following command in the terminal

./2fsrl

 

 

Type the following to run the two finger scroll script

 

 

All you need to do to have this run at startup is add it to you startup programs.

Note: If you are having problems with the application running at boot up, try adding xterm -e to the front of the path.

 

 

Add the script to startup

 

 

I hope this has been helpful.

 

 

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