Enable Mouse Wheel Scrolling in Ubuntu Hardy 8.04 Under VMWare

April 29, 2008 by Isaac

I recently installed Ubuntu Hardy (8.04) into a VMWare image on my WIndows machine. I know, that's backwards, Linux should be the host not the guest. It's actually my wife's computer, so I dare not remove Windows.

Anyway, the mouse wheel was not scrolling properly. After some searching I found the answer here. Basically, you need to edit your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file. Find the following section:

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Configured Mouse"
Driver "vmmouse"
...
EndSection

Replace that 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

You will need to reboot or restart your X server and mouse scrolling should now work.

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