How to Slow down a touchpad scrolling in Ubuntu
If you've got a notebook computer, you might be used to edge scroll on the touchpad when running Windows. This is where the right-hand edge of the notebook's touchpad is used as a virtual scrollbar - by running a finger up and down, the currently active window scrolls up and down correspondingly.
You might already have realized that you can activate the edge scroll functionality in Ubuntu using the Touchpad tab of System → Preferences → Mouse.
The problem I had was that the scrolling was just too fast. A light touch on the pad caused the webpage or file listing to fly up or down the screen.
The solution was to add a line to the xorg.conf configuration file, as follows:
1) Open the Xorg configuration file into Gedit:
$ gksu gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf
2) Look for the two lines that read:
Section "InputDevice"
Driver "synaptics"
Then, beneath all the lines that begin Option, add a new line as follows:
Option "VertScrollDelta" "50"
You can align the words with the other entries in the list if you want, although this doesn't matter.
3) Save the file, close any open programs, and hit Ctrl + Alt + Backspace to restart the X server. Login again as usual and the changes should be instantly visible.
If the scrolling is now too slow, try changing the value of "VertScrollData" to 25, or perhaps even less - the lower the value, the more sensitive the edge scroll becomes.
To make Firefox scroll fewer lines as you drag and scroll, start Firefox and type about:config into the URL bar. Agree to carry on despite the warning about voiding a possibly warranty.
Then, in the search bar, type
mousewheel.withnokey.sysnumlines.
In the list of results, double-click the entry so that it reads false, and turns bold. This try the new scroll speed by opening a new tab and browsing to a website.
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