Hello friends,

I am using Scientific Linux 6.1 on a Dell Vostro laptop with following configuration:

CPU: Core i5
RAM: 4GB
GPU: ATI Radeon 6630

I am happy with the distro but my touchpad side scrolling is not working.
It is an ALPS make as it originally shipped with Ubuntu 10.10 and also on Windows it uses the ALPS driver.

Also on this forum I found lot of people had solved this problem by editing their xorg.conf file but to my surprise my /etc/X11/ directory and its sub directories have no such file. So I am unable to find out what my X server is using to initialize itself as my display and its resolution is working fine...

On my Debian Squeeze also aren't xorg.conf in path you mentioned by default. So it isn't critical issue. What desktop are you using? KDE, Gnome have settings like Mouse setting or Pointing device setting and there is possible to configure scrolling behaviour too. Let little bit more details.

I use Gnome...and my touchpad is recognized as a PS/2 mouse and has no settings that a normal touchpad should have...
My computer originally came with Ubuntu 10.10 and the recovery image has a alps*.deb file...
so can I use that ??? can I convert .deb to .rpm and then will it work ???

Basically it is possible to convert deb to rpm, but I'm not sure it helps here since SW from that deb can depends on linux kernel version, libc version, other dependencies. So I propose look step by step through all touchpadh recognition steps and find out the problem. As fas as I understand, latest linux kernel should support alps touchpads. So lets look through
output of cat /proc/bus/input/devices and find something with ALPS or alps or touchpad or PS/2. In such way we'll find how alps device was recognized. On my laptop it is recognized as followed:

I: Bus=0011 Vendor=0002 Product=0007 Version=25b1
N: Name="SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad"
P: Phys=isa0060/serio4/input0
S: Sysfs=/devices/platform/i8042/serio4/input/input6
U: Uniq=
H: Handlers=mouse0 event6
B: EV=b
B: KEY=6420 0 70000 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
B: ABS=11000003

the output of the command /proc/bus/input/devices says PS/2 Generic Mouse below
there was also a section above it which says something about mouse not sure what

It looks kernel doesn't recognize the touchpad properly. It can be caused by improperly configured kernel or kernel regression of some kernel versions.

I've tried to figure out how to get more deeply into the problem and it seems that starting from analysing output of dmesg command is the most basic.
In case touchpad is recognizible kernel will report something like, in your case something like ALPS Touchpad will indicate success:
[ 19.543616] Synaptics Touchpad, model: 1, fw: 6.2, id: 0x25a0b1, caps: 0xa04713/0x200000/0x0
[ 19.580964] input: SynPS/2 Synaptics TouchPad as /devices/platform/i8042/serio4/input/input7

If something like "Generic PS/2 mouse detected" is in dmesg output, kernel should be changed/reconfigured.
After some searching on www I found the following problem description on ubuntuforums:
http://mikebeach.org/2011/04/correct...6510-in-linux/
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1561082&page=2

If I correctly understand your laptom came with Ubuntu installed and it worked well, but after installing Scientific Linux touchpad lost scrolling ability, so problem can be caused different kernel versions on Ubuntu and Scientific Linux.
Can you install other kernel? I suppose Scientific Linux provides several kernel versions available.
Other way could be to build linux kernel of that version what was installed on Ubuntu with options described on link below(make oldconfig than enable options that described below):
http://en.gentoo-wiki.com/wiki/Synaptics_Touchpad

ya you are right...thanks for making things clear...the problem lies in the kernel
dmesg output reports PS/2 generic mouse

I have custom compiled and installed kernels before...
So i will do it after some more research and will post you the results.
SL6 latest kernel version is 2.6.32-131.12.1 which I have right now...so I will try with the latest stable kernel.