Mike Hicks

Push My Buttons

I bought a Logitech MX500 mouse shortly after I moved because the PS/2 port on my computer started acting flaky. The mouse pointer jumped all over the place. I thought the mouse had died, but it now appears that the port itself has gone bad, as my new mouse (a USB and PS/2 one) exhibits exactly the same problems when it's plugged into that port. Fortunately, it works fine on a USB port.

Anyway, this mouse has more buttons than I know what to do with. Well, not quite. When I first got it, the buttons were mapped really weird under Linux. Some of the extra ones would repeat the functionality of other buttons on the mouse. But, now I have most of them working like they should.

To get the buttons working, I had to edit /etc/X11/XF86Config and edit the section for my mouse. It now looks like

Section "InputDevice"
        Identifier      "Mouse1"
        Driver          "mouse"
        Option          "Protocol"      "ExplorerPS/2"
        Option          "Device"        "/dev/input/mice"
        Option          "Buttons"       "7"
        Option          "ZAxisMapping"  "6 7"
        Option          "SendCoreEvents"        "true"
        Option          "Emulate3Buttons"       "yes"
EndSection

Note that this is for a secondary mouse entry. I still have my old PS/2 mouse configured as Mouse0, so if you only have one mouse, you'll have to remove the "SendCoreEvents" option and probably change the Identifier..

Unfortunately, editing the config file is not the only thing I had to do. I also have to run `xmodmap -e "pointer = 1 2 3 6 7 4 5"' to remap the scroll wheel "buttons" to 4 and 5, so that they will be accepted as scroll wheel buttons by most applications. Actually, I also have to run `xsetpointer Mouse1' or `xinput set-pointer Mouse1' before doing that, since I have to select which mouse I'm modifying. I may have to swap the order of the mice in my XF86Config file..

Additionally, I had to setup and run the imwheel program in order to get the extra buttons to do anything useful. Here's the contents of my ~/.imwheelrc:

#Default Settings
".*"
@Priority = -1000
None, Left, Control_L|Left
None, Right, Control_L|Right
Control_L, Left, Control_L|Left
Control_L, Right, Control_L|Right

Now, I run `imwheel -b 006700', and the buttons on the side of my mouse will take me forward and backward in my web browser window.

Geez, I don't know why more people don't use Linux :-p

Posted by mike at May 7, 2003 09:19 PM | Hardware , Software , XFree | TrackBack