Getting Synaptics trackpad to send actual scroll-wheel events

From Scrolling in GTK+ apps with synaptics driver :

When using a Windows laptop, you might be stuck with a synaptic touchpad.

Those crappy drivers with their so-called virtual scrolling create a fake window below the cursor to display their custom scrolling icon.

That window interfere with the signal sent to the application under, and GTK for some reason can’t detect that (most likely the devs don’t care about us). The result is being unable to scroll in popular GTK apps like Wireshark or Pidgin.

After playing with Spy++ and Procmon for some time, I found an interesting registry key that solved my problem. This setting will disable the custom cursor when you scroll, effectively fixing the scrolling problem in GTK apps.

First you have to open regedit. Navigate to
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Synaptics\SynTPEnh
and create a new DWORD called UseScrollCursor with a value of 0.

Restart SynTPEh (or reboot).

Scrolling should work in GTK apps now, but you won’t see the scrolling cursor anymore.

Let me explain it this way. The touch-pad itself has absolutely 0 concept of scrolling. it senses a touch... and reports back an X and Y. The driver takes that information... and determines how to interpret it as various mouse-ish gestures. So... in short... it's up-to the driver to determine WTF a scroll is. So the problem here is the driver... or the driver configuration. And since you didn't specify what flavor of linux... your results might be rather mixed. Synaptics did create a suite for common flavors of Linux... but what you need to acquire them... or if it's available for your distro... is beyond me.