Thinkpads Forum

Hello all,

I've been able to use scrolling in firefox, etc via the middle Ultra-nav button with about 90% accuracy. Most of the time it works fine, however, sometimes I end up with the scroll being interpreted as a click and the browser moves backwards to the previous page I was viewing - this is mildly annoying to maddening depending on what I am doing (reviewing a form of data for example). The xorg.conf changes I made are listed below - has anyone else encountered these issues or found a way around them? I'm running a fully up to date install of Ubuntu 6.10 on the thinkpad R40 listed in my sig.

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Configured Mouse"
Driver "mouse"
Option "CorePointer"
Option "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
Option "Protocol" "ExplorerPS/2"
Option "EmulateWheel" "on"
Option "EmulateWheelButton" "2"
Option "YAxisMapping" "4 5"
Option "XAxisMapping" "6 7"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
EndSection

Thanks!

Wolfman:

Different ThinkPad here but middle-button scrolling works pretty well in most Linux applications, the exception being Firefox. That's true in Windows also; middle-button scrolling just sucks on Firefox.

You might want to try the Firefox extension "Grab and Drag" for a MUCH better scrolling experience with Firefox.

k0lo wrote:Wolfman:

Different ThinkPad here but middle-button scrolling works pretty well in most Linux applications, the exception being Firefox. That's true in Windows also; middle-button scrolling just sucks on Firefox.

Can't speak for linux, but middle-button scrolling is what I always do in Firefox on windows...hard to do anything else...one of the reasons why I bought a Thinkpad so there'd be the third button!

Alex:

"sucks" isn't very helpful a description, is it? Sorry.

What I meant was that if you have the middle button set to "normal" and use it to scroll documents, the scrolling action is less than satisfactory in Firefox. Let's take Windows behavior as an example. Scrolling in IE7 is as smooth as silk whereas in Firefox it is "jumpy".

You may also want to try the "Grab and Drag" Firefox extension. With it you scroll by clicking anywhere on the web page and dragging it up or down, kind of like the scrolling hand in Adobe Acrobat. You'll find it much smoother in Firefox than the middle-button scrolling. Works equally well on Linux or Windows, and is extremely handy on a tablet PC.

http://grabanddrag.mozdev.org/

Thanks for the tip on grab and drag Mark I'll give that a try!