[X4U] Two-Finger Scrolling on older Macs.

[Stroller]

On Feb 16, 2005, at 1:30 am, Joe Block wrote:
> On Feb 14, 2005, at 10:53 AM, Jon wrote:
>> See this link about the new two-finger scrolling:
>> http://www-users.kawo2.rwth-aachen.de/~razzfazz/
>>
>> The hack's obviously not for the faint hearted, since you have to 
>> make a change to /System/Library/Extensions.
>> And you should make a backup copy of Apple's mouse driver.
>>
>> I followed the instructions, and it worked as described. Now my 12 
>> inch PB from last June has two-finger scrolling.
>> ...
>> Also, can anyone guess if this will survive 10.3.9 or will it have to 
>> be repeated? (Do the upgrades usually replace the whole Extensions 
>> library or just items that change?)
>
> I wrote a StartupItem to load it automatically without having to 
> replace the stock Apple kext. Details are on my blog at 
> http://digitalhominid.blogspot.com

Hi Joe!

I really love this two-finger stuff! If I had a girlfriend, I'd make a 
dirty joke at this point, but let's get down to your code... I think 
that you're spot-on! If Apple are sensible, all us Powerbook owners 
with compatible trackpads will simply gain an extra tab in our mouse 
preferences come 10.3.9... but Joe User would be wise to guard against 
their marketing a$$h0les restricting this feature to 2005.1+ models and 
against updates breaking things for folks like us. So I think you're 
right in being cautious against hard-installing Mr Becker's .kext. I 
feel that using a StartUpItem to load the .kext is perfect - on my 
gravestone i would like engraved "I don't think anything can possibly 
break if we do it this way".

So I tried to follow your HOWTO... I guess I wasn't concentrating as I 
missed the line which said "cd into the TwoFingerScrolling directory", 
and ended up working this out for myself & spending some time editing 
the script to work out what directory it was stored in, so to correctly 
achieve a relative path to AppleADBMouse.kext.

I'm pretty sure you have one glitch  - in point (4) you say `chown +rx 
TwoFingerScrolling/TwoFingerScrolling`. I think you mean `chmod`.

Being an experienced *nix admin, I skipped another part of the 
instructions... I ran the script without any parameters. It's really 
obvious from your code that one needs to "start" or "stop" the 
trackpad, so I decided to put in some error checking in to explain this 
to other numptie users like myself. I guess you knew before I did that 
Apple's /etc/rc.common breaks the `if [ -z "$1" ]` test, but I spent 
quite a considerable while working this out, and ended up adding a 
whole loada code. You don't have to be drunk to c0de Bash on OS X, but 
it... well, anyway...

Please find attached a version of your script that I've happily hacked 
on for several hours - I hope you like the error checking I've added. I 
learned loads going through your code, and I thank both you and Mr 
Becker for sharing your work. I'll happily be installing this on my 
mother's boko in the next few days. I've cc'd in Mr Becker in case he 
has any comments.

Stroller.