Comment 161 for bug 308191

You should be able to stop Gnome overwriting your settings if you disable its mouse plugin by navigating to "apps/gnome_settings_daemon/plugins/mouse/" in gconf-editor and un-ticking "active", then configure manually with a file in xorg.conf.d (see man sysnaptics for syntax).

@Henrik:
Could you point me to the patches/source combo to compile this on other distros/without dkms?