Using keyboard to emulate left and right mouse buttons
 

I am running Linux Ubuntu on a Dell Inspiron laptop that I bought at a garage sale for 50 cents. After spending quite a few hours resurrecting it, it works just fine except for the left and right mouse buttons on the touch pad. They do not function.

Is there a way to emulate the left and right mouse buttons from the keyboard?

(I know that I can just plug in a mouse, but I would rather just use the keyboard if possible.)

I know in ubuntu you can assign mouse controls to your number-pad (run "gnome-control-center" and click on keyboard and the accessibility tab) and from there you can set it to simulate right click by holding down the primary click button (now assigned to your control panel) by clicking (in gnome-control-panel) on mouse and accessibility.

However, I'm not sure if you can assign these to two separate keys.

... Shift + F10 fires the right click

This can be useful to minimize mouse use: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/KeyboardShortcuts

* if it's a low ram (128MB or 256MB), try to use a lighter distro than Ubuntu, like: http://crunchbanglinux.org/downloads/statler/alpha-02/ (this even have "built in" keyboard shortcuts to start common apps...)

Problem solved!

Your two answers solved my problem. I had to enable the number keys to direct mouse movement so now Function + i(5) gives me a left click, and Shift + F10 gives me a right click.

Thank you very much!