Asus eeePC, ubuntu, firefox and the synaptic touchpad

Im playing around with the Asus eeePC and have since tried out different linux flavours on it. Ive settled with Ubuntu mainly because of familiarity. And after a reinstall, its fast enough.

A surprising discovery is that the synaptics touchpad features horizontal scrolling too. To enable it,

1) Go to System / Preference / Mouse
2) Click the "Touchpad" tab
3) Enable "Horizontal Scrolling"

Firefox will then become impossible to use, because the horizontal action is defaulted to "back" and "forward". So just like the Mighty Mouse settings, adjust these about:config settings:

4) mousewheel.horizscroll.withnokey.action from "2" to "0"
5) mousewheel.horizscroll.withnokey.numlines from "-1" to "1"

And there you have it, vertical and horizontal scrolling on the little eeePC.

My thoughts on this device in a later post.

yk