Fixing/(Work Around) periodically occuring
TrackPoint Thinkpad R61 issues on Debian GNU/Linux
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
respectively
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/sh echo -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!