Natural Scrolling is a Linux application, which brings the Mac OS X style reverse scrolling feature to Ubuntu Linux. Using “Natural Scrolling”(application), you can push your fingers upwards to make the page content move upwards, and vice versa. Hence, this application gives you the reverse scrolling functionality for your Ubuntu machine, just like one would have on a Mac or iOS device. This application is available for both Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal and Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot. You can install this application in Ubuntu, from the commands given below.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:zedtux/naturalscrolling sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install naturalscrolling

Once Natural Scrolling (application) is installed, launch it from the Unity Dash and enable Natural Scrolling feature from the app-indicator menu. You can also make this application auto-start with system start up to avoid manually launching it each time you login to you Ubuntu computer. On the contrary, you can disable Natural Scrolling feature from the app-indicator menu.

While there has been much criticism among Mac OS X users regarding the use of natural scrolling, it will be quite interesting to see how Ubuntu and other Linux OS users respond to this feature. For example, Mac OS X users have been complaining that unlike iOS, the Natural Scrolling feature in Mac is difficult to control when scrolling pages. It is worth seeing how “natural” this feature is considered by Linux users and if this can perhaps be considered as a default choice in upcoming Ubuntu distributions. You can download and compile the source package for Natural Scrolling from Github.

Download Natural Scrolling