The Thinkpad series (both Lenovo and IBM) has been well known for the its Trackpoint pointing device. On its low end to mid range system, this is the the only way to navigate / control the mouse cursor unless you use an external pointing device such as a mouse.

Using it may take some getting it use to but once you master it, you will find it more efficient since you dont have to move your hand away the general area of the keyboard.

Ideally, most standard Thinkpad units come with Microsoft Windows installed so the trackpoint should work fine. But if you opt to install linux as in my case, most likely the trackpoint will work out of the box but NOT the blue middle button.

The blue middle button is very helpful when one need to scroll down a long document. This is good because you dont have to move the mouse cursor to a scroll bar just to scroll up or down a document.

But there is hope! By following this guide, you will be able to activate the trusty trackpoint. In this example, I am running Ubuntu6.10 Edgy Eft on an IBM Thinkpad x30. The procedures outlined below will generally work on any system that uses Xorg.

To use the blue middle TrackPoint button as a scroll wheel (using the red TrackPoint itself to scroll up and down), do the following. In a terminal, enter these commands:

sudo cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf-original
sudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf

In the editor, find the section headed Section “InputDevice” / Identifier “Configured Mouse” and the following lines above the “EndSection” line:

Option    "EmulateWheel"        "true"
Option    "EmulateWheelButton"  "2"

Save the file. Logout, restart X with Ctrl-Alt-Backspace, and log in again. Enjoy using your trackpoint pointer!