Disclaimer
This post does not offer the truth in how trackpoint speed and sensitivity should be set. It just shows how I am doing it at the moment. Since this is the first time I wrote a systemd-service-file, or anything like this, I am very happy to receive any feedback on mistakes I may have made or anything else.
Why trackpoint speed/sensitivity matters (to me)
I am currently using a Thinkpad X220i with a heavily keyboard-based setup. Nearely everything I can do I can do with just my keyboard. The few things I still need my mouse for (mostly browsing) are therefore done with my trackpoint, because this way my fingers don’t have to leave the keyboard. Obviously, I don’t want to have to push the trackpoint for 20 seconds to achive what feels like seven pixels onscreen mouse-movement. Therefore, I increased both trackpoint speed and sensitivity
How I used to do it
Before I changed the settings to use systemd, I had a script named “trackpoint” in my home. It looked something like this.
#!/bin/bash
bash -c 'echo -n 200 > /sys/devices/platform/i8042/serio1/speed'
bash -c 'echo -n 250 > /sys/devices/platform/i8042/serio1/sensitivity'
Both these numbers can be changed according to your needs, and they seem to work just fine for me. The settings for your trackpoint may be located somewhere else, for a friend of mine it’s /sys/devices/platform/i8042/serio1/serio2/speed. Since both the speed- and the sensitivity-file are owned by root, after every startup I had to execute
$ sudo ./trackpoint
which I found quite annoying. After talking to some friends, I found out that apparently systemd should handle things like this for me. So I decided to change my setup to do this.
How it is done now
At first, I wrote a systemd-service file, located somewhere in /etc/systemd/system, called trackpoint_sensitivity_set.service
[Unit]
Description=Trackpointer Speed StartUp Setup
After=multi-user.target
[Service]
ExecStart=/opt/bin/trackpoint_sensitivity.sh
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
Then, I placed my script from before in /opt/bin/trackpoint_sensitivity.sh, because that seems to be the place for things like this. Obviously, the script has to be executable, for root at least. After this, it’s just
$ sudo systemctl enable trackpoint_sensitivity_set.service
$ sudo systemctl start trackpoint_sensitivity_set.service
and the trackpoint speed and sensitivity should be set right on every startup.