Enable Two-Finger Scrolling in Ubuntu

Here’s a small hack I stumbled across in the Ubuntu Forums: you can enable support for two-finger scrolling on your Synaptics touchpad with a couple lines added to the “synaptics” section of your /etc/xorg.conf.

Option		"VertTwoFingerScroll"   "1"
Option		"HorizTwoFingerScroll"  "1"

Here’s what the entire section looks like for me:

Section "InputDevice"
	Identifier	"Synaptics Touchpad"
	Driver		"synaptics"
	Option		"SendCoreEvents"	"true"
	Option		"Device"		"/dev/psaux"
	Option		"Protocol"		"auto-dev"
	Option		"HorizScrollDelta"	"0"
	Option		"VertTwoFingerScroll"	"1"
	Option		"HorizTwoFingerScroll"	"1"
EndSection

There are a lot more options described in the forum thread linked above, like assigning a different mouse click to each corner of the touchpad. Once you make these changes, just restart X (or your computer), and you should be able to scroll with your fingers!

I’m running Ubuntu Feisty with the latest version of the Synaptics driver (synclient -V says 0.14.6), but I think this should work with any distribution or desktop environment, assuming you’re using the Synaptics driver. Additional configuration instructions can be found in the Ubuntu Community Documentation.

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Published:
October 7, 2007
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