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Delicious It!Manually Setting TrackPoint Speed (Acceleration), & Sensitivity
I run Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) Linux on my Lenovo Thinkpad T60. I prefer to use the TrackPoint (Little Red Dot) instead of an external mouse. The default speed and sensitivity settings in Ubuntu were way two slow. It was so bad, my finger was hurting. I set both Acceleration and Sensitivity to the highest setting using System > Preferences > Mouse, but it did nothing. I found out these settings are for a traditional mouse, and don't affect the IBM TrackPoint or TrackPad.
The Speed and Sensitivity configuration is located in two files named speed and sensitivity respectively. They each contain a single setting that is a number from 0 - 255. You can use the shell script below to change the settings. Once you figure out what settings work best for you, add them to your rc.local file.
Setting Speed and Sensitivity values through a Bach Script.
#!/bin/bash # Values for Speed & Sensitivity! speed='200' sensitivity='175' # Finding path to speed and sensitivity files speed_file=`find "/sys/devices/platform/i8042" -iname "speed" -type f` sensitivity_file=`find "/sys/devices/platform/i8042" -iname "sensitivity" -type f` # Overwrite speed_file with new value echo -n $speed | sudo tee $speed_file >/dev/null # Overwrite sensitivity_file with new value echo -n $sensitivity | sudo tee $sensitivity_file >/dev/null # Display Results echo -n ' Speed: ' cat $speed_file echo -n ' Sensitivity: ' cat $sensitivity_file
Everytime the system reboots these settings will be lost. If you want the settings to take affect at boot, you'll need to put the commands in your rc.local script. This script runs every time the computer boots. Follow these steps.
1. Locate the speed & sensitivity files using the find command:
find "/sys/devices/platform/i8042/" -iname speed -type f
find "/sys/devices/platform/i8042/" -iname sensitivity -type f
2. Open your rc.local script in gedit.
sudo gedit /etc/rc.local
3. Add the following lines to your rc.local file and Save (Note: Replace my values and the path with your own)
echo -n 200 > /sys/devices/platform/i8042/serio1/serio2/speed
echo -n 175 > /sys/devices/platform/i8042/serio1/serio2/sensitivity
GUI Resources
GPointing Device Settings (GUI for configuring the Middle Button and Wheel emulation.)
sudo apt-get install gpointing-device-settings
sudo gpointing-device-settings
Configure-Trackpoint (GUI for setting Speed and Sensitivity)
This utility is not included with Ubuntu. You'll have to download and install it manually.
Download Configure-Trackpoint
Installing the Configure-Trackpoint utility
sudo apt-get install sysfsutils
sudo dpkg -i ~/Downloads/configure-trackpoint_0.7-1_i386.deb
sudo configure-trackpoint