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I recently installed Ubuntu on my Macbook. Everything seems to be working just fine except for the trackpad. The right click (with 2 fingers) works just fine but when I try to scroll the cursor it is very slow and not as smooth as on Mac OS X.

Do I need to update the drivers or is there some other option that i need to activate or change to get it to work the way I want it?

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  • Hi @Rajat, have you managed to solve this issue?
    – Art
    Nov 20, 2011 at 11:23

4 Answers 4

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Have you searched Synaptic for "Touchpad" software? For example, with lenovo computers, installing synaptics (a touchpad driver for Lenovo touchpads) gives an interface the user can use to modify settings like speed of cursor etc.

Try searching for "Touchpad" software and see if anything relevant appears for Mac OS trackpad/touchpad.

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You could try Touchegg, it's a multi-touch gesture creator app.

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Put this line in your Startup Applications:

synclient FingerLow=10; synclient FingerHigh=20

That should fix the jitter. It works on my MacBook 4,1 anyway.

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EDIT: I wrote all of this with the assumption that you were talking about scrolling speed rather than cursor/pointer speed. For the latter everything is the same except for the "VertScrollDelta" option.

Also most of these things can be changed using a GUI on Kubuntu (or presumably with any other distro with KDE as the desktop environment)


You might find a solution from configuring synaptics. You can read about all the possible Options from command line using man synaptics or from this online version of manpages. I did something similar on an Ubuntu 16.04 based distro (Elementary OS Loki) just now.

If you find some Option there that you would like to change, you can probably (I couldn't on Elementary OS) test it with synclient:

synclient YOUR_OPTION_HERE=YOUR_NUMBER_HERE

YOUR_OPTION_HERE - Might be VertScrollDelta for example.

YOUR_NUMBER_HERE - Since I didn't change this particular value I have no idea what numbers might be suitable for this one (they have to be integers though).

And when you're finished trying the changes out, there's 2 ways to make your changes permanent:

The xorg.conf way

In my case /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/50-synaptics.conf instructed me to first copy the config file:

sudo cp -a /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/50-synaptics.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/50-synaptics.conf

Then I edit the new file with my editor of choice. GUI editors (e.g. gedit, kate, scratch-text-editor) need sudo -H in front of them and CLI ones (e.g. nano, vim, emacs) can be run with simply sudo I believe.

sudo -H YOUR_EDITOR_HERE /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/50-synaptics.conf

In that file you add your new lines into a suitable spot. Possible example:

Section "InputClass"
        Identifier "touchpad catchall"
        Driver "synaptics"
        MatchIsTouchpad "on"
        Option "YOUR_OPTION_HERE" "YOUR_NUMBER_HERE"

Restart (relogging might also work) and see if it changed.

The synclient way

(This one I did not test myself. Some credits to weberc2.)

Add the following line to your Startup Applications:

synclient YOUR_OPTION_HERE=YOUR_NUMBER_HERE

If you can't find any more convenient way to do it, then this is one way to accomplish that (tested on Ubuntu and Kubuntu):

Create a new file at /home/YOUR_USERNAME_HERE/.config/autostart with whatever name. It should have the .desktop extension (name ending). Open your new file with an editor (no sudo needed this time) and write:

[Desktop Entry]
X-GNOME-Autostart-enabled=true
Exec=synclient YOUR_OPTION_HERE=YOUR_NUMBER_HERE
Type=Application
StartupNotify=true
Terminal=false
Name=YOUR_NEW_NAME_HERE
Hidden=true

I'm not actually certain which of these lines are absolutely necessary, but any extra lines shouldn't hurt. The Exec line is most important.

Save your file. Close it. Restart (relogging might also work) and see if it changed.

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