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up vote 7 down vote favorite
1

I know that my touchpad is capable of it. I can enable glitch-free two-finger scrolling by running this script:

#! /bin/sh

synclient VertTwoFingerScroll=1
synclient HorizTwoFingerScroll=1
synclient EmulateTwoFingerMinW=10
synclient EmulateTwoFingerMinZ=48

However, in the "Mouse" preferences GUI, the "two-finger scrolling" option is greyed out. It worked fine on my old laptop.

Here is the output of sudo lshw -sanitize, if it makes a difference.

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What version of Ubuntu are you running? And what laptop is this? – Mussnoon Nov 23 '10 at 13:18
It's Ubuntu 10.10 on a Dell Studio XPS 16 (but I've had this problem since at least 10.04). You can see the details of my hardware in the lshw output that I posted. – Matthew Nov 23 '10 at 16:00
Please use the synaptics tag instead of synaptic to put your question in the list of Synaptics (touchpad) questions, rather than with the Synaptic Package Manager questions. (Oh how I long to have 200 rep so I can just do this housekeeping myself.) – dgw Dec 16 '10 at 2:06
@Voyagerfan5761: Done. Good call, I was wondering why there were so many questions about touchpads. – Matthew Dec 16 '10 at 5:43
There are enough touchpad questions. I asked one myself. They can be finicky little buggers. Glad you found my suggestion useful. :) – dgw Dec 16 '10 at 5:56

3 Answers

up vote 2 down vote accepted

This is my understanding of it. Ubuntu doesn't have support for the Synaptics touchpad officially out of the box, so what that script does is it emulates the multi-touch. I think. I don't know for sure, but that is my understanding of that. (I myself have a Synapatics trackpad on my Asus Eee PC, so I've spent a far amount of time working on this.)

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up vote 3 down vote

Press Alt+F2, write gconf-editor, it will open gconf-editor, go to destkop, gnome, peripherals, touchpad and type 2 for the variable "scroll_method". The option will stay grayed but two finger scroll will be enable. Works for me.

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I'm afraid this doesn't work for me. It's ok though--I've got two-finger scrolling working, I just want to know why I couldn't do it from the GUI. – Matthew Nov 24 '10 at 20:05
up vote 1 down vote

I don't have a laptop to test it with, but I recently stumbled upon this site: http://stuffivelearned.org/doku.php?id=os:linux:general:synapticstouchtricks

Perhaps this helps you.

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Great link, thanks. – Mussnoon Nov 23 '10 at 13:26

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