Inverted Mouse Axis on a Ubuntu Live USB

Question

I have an Ubuntu Live USB and I was looking for xorg.conf so I could insert an Option "InvX" "on" within it (I am not quite sure how that works exactly yet). xorg.conf does not exist in its normal place on the live usb/cd. Where can I easily and permanently make this change?

Background: I am running ubuntu on a kiosk machine where mouse movement works like a touch screen (sort of).

Answer 1

xorg.conf is, for all intents and purposes, no longer there. But there is now a directory, /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/, that keeps configuration options for x.org.

A side note: In 10.04 Lucid, the directory is /usr/lib/X11/xorg.conf.d/.

To invert the mouse movement:

• Create a file /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/50-invertaxes.conf

  • to create this file, you need to gain root privileges. Start your favourite text-editor like this: gksu gedit. This will prompt you for a password.

  • alternatively, you can type this into a Terminal:

    sudo nano /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/50-invertaxes.conf
    

• Put the following into the file:

  Section "InputClass"
      Identifier  "Invert Mouse"
      MatchProduct    "The name our your mouse in xorg"
      MatchDevicePath "/dev/input/event*"
      Option      "InvertY"       "true"
      Option      "InvertX"       "true"
  EndSection
  

  Where you replace "the name of your mouse in xorg" with the real name as detected by xorg.

• to find out what Identifer you need to use, open a terminal and type

  xinput list
  

  this will produce output similar to this:

  ⎡ Virtual core pointer                      id=2    [master pointer  (3)]
  ⎜   ↳ Virtual core XTEST pointer                id=4    [slave  pointer  (2)]
  ⎜   ↳ Logitech USB Receiver                     id=10   [slave  pointer  (2)]
  ⎜   ↳ Logitech USB Receiver                     id=11   [slave  pointer  (2)]
  ⎜   ↳ SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad                id=14   [slave  pointer  (2)]
  [more...]
  

  From there I can see the Identifier of my Logitech mouse, Logitech USB Reciever.

To be able to keep this configuration, you will have to have set up your Live USB drive with "Persistent storage":

Enable the option at the bottom, "Stored in reserved extra space", before creating your new USB startup disk and your settings will be kept when rebooting.