Recently, I upgraded to Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex and found that my Thinkpad’s TrackPoint scrolling stopped working. While searching on the Internet, I found a post called Scrolling with the Thinkpad’s TrackPoint in Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid by Phil Sung that explains in a clear and concise way how to enabling scrolling in Ubuntu 8.10 using the ThinkPad TrackPoint.

I’m quoting what Phil says in his post:

Ubuntu Intrepid (8.10) switches to evdev for X server input, which has the unfortunate side effect of breaking old EmulateWheel configurations. So scrolling using the middle button + TrackPoint (which I absolutely love) was broken for a while. However, the version of evdev in Intrepid has now caught up and supports these features. Instead of modifying your xorg.conf, create a new file called /etc/hal/fdi/policy/mouse-wheel.fdi with the following contents:

<match key="info.product" string="TPPS/2 IBM TrackPoint">
 <merge key="input.x11_options.EmulateWheel" type="string">true</merge>
 <merge key="input.x11_options.EmulateWheelButton" type="string">2</merge>
 <merge key="input.x11_options.XAxisMapping" type="string">6 7</merge>
 <merge key="input.x11_options.YAxisMapping" type="string">4 5</merge>
 <merge key="input.x11_options.ZAxsisMapping" type="string">4 5</merge>
 <merge key="input.x11_options.Emulate3Buttons" type="string">true</merge>
</match>

Thanks, Phil!