Posts Tagged ‘Fixing/(Work Around) periodically occuring TrackPoint Thinkpad R61 issues on Debian GNU/Linux’

Fixing/(Work Around) periodically occuring TrackPoint Thinkpad R61 issues on Debian GNU/Linux

Monday, December 27th, 2010

My notebook had problems every now and then, my notebook TrackPoint to which I’m firmly accustomed and I use it instead of the integrated touch point to the notebook

I personally find the trackpoint to be a way more handier and convenient than the normal embeded notebook mouse.

Thus I found it quite a hell, that every now and then suddenly my trackpoint went dead (e.g. my mouse pointer completely stopped responding when it is navigated with the TrackPoint device).

This freezing of my trackpoint were really irritating, there were two ways to fix the issues actually:

1. Restart the XServer (Xorg) && GNOME respectivelyor

2.Change the current Trackpoint configured Speed and Sentivitity, with the commands as shown below:

# Configure Thinkpad
echo -n 120 > /sys/devices/platform/i8042/serio1/serio2/speed
echo -n 250 > /sys/devices/platform/i8042/serio1/serio2/sensitivity

Thus just recently an I was enlighted with an idea on how to work around the trackpoint hanging issues;

I thought if the above two lines of code are aligning the trackpoint speed and sentitivity and thus restoring back my trackpoint functionality, why I don’t just put the two lines into a tiny bash shell script and set it to routinely execute on crontab.

Well guess what my idea seems to work like a charm! just till now!

It’s been almost a week since I have put the above two lines in a script in /usr/sbin/restart_trackpoint.sh

The script executes via cron on every 30 minutes, like so:

0,30 * * * * /usr/sbin/restart_trackpoint.sh >/dev/null 2>&1

The /usr/sbin/restart_trackpoint.sh script contents are as follows:

#!/bin/shecho -n 120 > /sys/devices/platform/i8042/serio1/serio2/speed
echo -n 250 > /sys/devices/platform/i8042/serio1/serio2/sensitivity

You can download my thinkpad trackpoint hanging issues work-around script here

Place the script whenever you like or create it from scratch by copy pasting the code into a file into a certain destination set it on a cron and your issues should be fixed up.

Feedbacks if the problem is solved on other thinkpads is very welcome!