In the newer Ubuntu’s they’ve moved to evdev, which is a much more dynamic system for configuring input devices. Unfortunately, it doesn’t quite seem to understand that I want wheel emulation on my Thinkpad’s trackpoint. Fortunately, there seems to be a way to set it explicity. I use the following script:

#!/bin/sh
DEVICEID=3
xinput set-int-prop $DEVICEID "Wheel Emulation" 8 1
xinput set-int-prop $DEVICEID "Wheel Emulation Button" 8 2
xinput list-props $DEVICEID

The value for DEVICEID can be figured out by running the command xinput list and looking for entry. On mine there’s a line that says:

"TPPS/2 IBM TrackPoint"	id=3	[XExtensionPointer]

Looks like the settings get reset when you come back from resume, so you have to run the script again. I’m sure there’s some way to do it automatically, but I frankly haven’t run Linux enough on this laptop to be bothered to figure that part out.