So I’m using a different laptop. It has a touchpad for mousing around, and on the touchpad are arrows indicating you are able to use edge scrolling. This laptop is new enough it presumably has two-finger touch sensitivity, yet for whatever reason Unity’s System Preferences showed “Two finger scrolling” as greyed.
I prefer two-finger scrolling and thus I poked around the Webz to see what I could see.
I found this question asked and answered which had a solution to enable two-finger scrolling. Essentially the solution (work-around really) is a collection of three commands which enable two-finger scrolling (why it is greyed is another matter for another time).
I tested it and it worked on my machine (a Lenovo w500) as well. Great.
As advised in the article one could add those three lines as part of one’s start-up scripts (.bashrc in most cases), but I was feeling differently. First I consolidated those three lines into one line using double-ampersands. Then I created an alias called touchpad which contained those three-now-one lines of code.
Confusedly, this work-around only remained effective until the machine went to sleep. I would understand any logout, but you’ll see from the code that this effects X and X must relaunch after sleep (or at least changes state enough to reset this).
Checking the man page for alias (which I had to find on-line as my bash in Ubuntu 14.04 doesn’t have it) I found that I could make an alias persist (or at least make it get recreated) by adding it to my .bash_aliases file in my home directory.
Now it works great. I have added that alias to each user account I use on this laptop so it is easy to call. Perhaps one day I’ll add the work-around elsewhere so I won’t have to instantiate it, but for now I have this.
Below you will see the code I used. I hope this helps you today.
## #!/bin/bash # by JamesIsIn from JamesIsIn.com # Do something nice today. # Here is my alias. The code between the single quotes is what you would need if your aim was merely to test-fix your touchpad. alias touchpad='xinput --set-prop --type=int --format=32 "SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad" "Synaptics Two-Finger Pressure" 4 && xinput --set-prop --type=int --format=32 "SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad" "Synaptics Two-Finger Width" 8 && xinput --set-prop --type=int --format=8 "SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad" "Synaptics Two-Finger Scrolling" 1 0' # Here is my .bash_aliases file. cat .bash_aliases # command to enable two-finger scrolling alias touchpad='xinput --set-prop --type=int --format=32 "SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad" "Synaptics Two-Finger Pressure" 4 && xinput --set-prop --type=int --format=32 "SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad" "Synaptics Two-Finger Width" 8 && xinput --set-prop --type=int --format=8 "SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad" "Synaptics Two-Finger Scrolling" 1 0' ##