February 12, 2005
Mac: Two Finger Scrolling
The new powerbooks recently released by Apple have a new feature, trackpad scrolling. This is great but all us who have a powerbook pre 2005 this feature is out of reach... or is it. Here is an article that describes how to apply the same driver to pre 2005 powerbooks. I have applied this to my powerbook that was purchased late 2004 running 10.3.8 with no problems whatsoever. This patch will not work on all laptops, to check enter the following into your terminal application:
ioreg -l | grep “W Enhanced Trackpad”
The output of this command should be '“W Enhanced Trackpad” = 1'. If you do not get this it means that your trackpad is not compatible or you are running the SideTrack utility.
If you do get the right output then go to this this page and download the altered driver and follow the simple instructions.
To install the driver once downloaded you use the following commands to change the ownership on the driver, unload the existing driver and then load the new driver:
sudo chown -R root:wheel ./AppleADBMouse.kext
sudo kextunload -b com.apple.driver.AppleADBMouse && \
sudo kextload ./AppleADBMouse.kext
I must warn you that you are using terminal to modify the state of the mouse driver so please be careful and follow the instructions carefully.
UPDATE - There is an installer now and is called iScroll2
Links
Two Finger Scrolling with pre-2005 Powerbooks and iBooks
