How To Enable Mouse Wheel Scrolling in Ubuntu 8.04 on VMware

I was trying to make the vmware virtual appliance ubuntu 8.04 mouse scroll wheel to work, and I found the solution here. It worked great.

Original site http://peterc.org/2008/64-how-to-enable-vertical-mouse-wheel-scrolling-in-ubuntu-hardy-on-vmware-fusion.html

I was having problems installing VMware Tools on Ubuntu Hardy (8.04) under VMware Fusion but got to the bottom of it.

The next problem was trying to get the mouse scroll wheel to work. I did some Googling and most of the guides suggested I change a single line in xorg.conf (namely, set the “Protocol” of the mouse device to “ImPS/2″). It didn’t work. On a limb I thought I’d try changing the driver from “vmmouse” to “mouse” and this solved the problem, but the mouse tracking and acceleration was TOTALLY different between OS X and Linux.. eugh!

With some perseverance, I’ve found a solution. You can use the vmmouse driver, keep the synchronized mouse tracking and acceleration, and use your mouse wheel as it was intended.

I have been told this technique works on VMware Workstation and VMware Player on the PC too, but I haven’t tried it on there myself.

Steps to Enable Mouse Wheel Scrolling in Ubuntu Hardy under VMware Fusion

Launch a Terminal (Applications menu -> Accessories -> Terminal).

Type:

sudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Scroll down (it’s not far, perhaps 20 - 30 lines) till you see a block that looks like this:

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Configured Mouse"
Driver "vmmouse"
[.. blah blah blah ..]
EndSection

Replace that whole section with this:

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Configured Mouse"
Driver "vmmouse"
Option "CorePointer"
Option "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
Option "Protocol" "ImPS/2"
Option "Buttons" "5"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
EndSection

Save the file, then close all your apps and hit Ctrl+Alt+Backspace. X restarts within a few seconds, and you’re back up and running. Scrolling should now be possible!

I haven’t gotten to the bottom of horizontal scrolling yet. I thought a ZAxisMapping of “4 5 11 12″ would do it, but I suspect either VMware Fusion’s mouse driver does things a different way, or maybe it’s mouse specific (not likely). I’ll update this post if I work it out.

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