Configuring Lenovo TrackPoint Mouse Wheel Emulation Scrolling in Ubuntu

I have a Lenovo X120e and have grown accustomed to using the once-loathed TrackPoint (also known as the nubbin, the navigation nipple, the eraserhead, and others) for scrolling through Web pages, windows, etc. as I would with a mousewheel. Here is how you would do it in Ubuntu (in this case 11.04 Natty Narwhal, but it should apply to anything Maverick or later:Open up a terminal and type:gpointing-device-settingsUPDATE (8/13/11): The package isn't installed by default in 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot, so...

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Ubuntu Natty on Lenovo ThinkPad X120e

If you've read my earlier post regarding Maverick on this machine, you'll know I ran into a few annoying issues.The biggest problem was that my Broadcom wireless driver kept getting deactivated with every reboot, so I decided to try installing Natty instead.The first issue I ran into with Natty was that the installer kept crapping out before the partitioning phase with an error about ubi-partman failing to start due to error 141. There are a couple of Launchpad bugs filed for this error, but a claimed fix that was checked in a few days earlier did not seem to help things. What fixed me up, though,...

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My First Mid-horns for Hifi

I've spent a lot of time on audiophile forums reading about the advantages of horns over purely cone-based speakers, including crisp sound reproduction, consistency, "realism" and extremely high sensitivity. The drawbacks, of course, being high cost (sometimes ridiculously so), a dearth of non-vintage models to choose from, few places to demo products before buying and, perhaps most importantly, the tremendous size requirements for horns that will reach lower frequencies. Horns are also known for...

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Ubuntu Maverick on Lenovo X120e Fusion Laptop

UPDATE 3/23/11: Natty seems to work much better with these systems, so I recommend skipping Maverick and going straight for 11.04, even thought it's still in Alpha stage at the time of this writing. Check out my post about it here.Original Post:Due to a wonderful pricing error at Lenovo, I got a really sweet deal on a Thinkpad X120e laptop, featuring AMD's new Zacate Fusion chipset.When trying to install Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick on it, though, the Ubiquity installer kept failing with this error:grub-install efi-dummy failed. This is a fatal error.To fix this, you need to go into the computer's BIOS...

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Filter and Shader Stacking In SSNES

Themaister just added support for multipass shader application--a.k.a. shader stacking--to SSNES, his excellent (and recently GUI-fied) frontend for libsnes. His implementation includes some interesting and fancy options, including configurable scale factors for the first pass (i.e., the first shader). This allows hq2x to be scaled to its expected scale factor during the first pass and then scaled up again to fit the desired resolution, resulting in much better retention of detail (see this post...

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Themaister's Waterpaint and Scanline Pixel Shaders for SNES

Themaister, author of the excellent libsnes interface SSNES, has been working on some really fantastic GLSL pixel shaders for use with compatible emulators, such as bsnes and SNES9x.First, we'll take a look at the waterpaint shader, which has an effect similar to smoothing filters, such as SuperSaI, but with a little extra fattening that gives it the appearance of a watercolor painting:This looks great already, but text can sometimes get a bit hard to read and some details get flattened out, so...

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