New Mouse

Mark K. Kim markslist at cbreak.org
Thu Mar 28 22:47:02 PST 2002


I have a three-button scroll mouse.  The gpm starts as:

   gpm -t ps/2 -m /dev/psaux

I use XFree 3.3.6.  XFree 3.3.6 comes with a method to map the wheel to
buttons 4 and 5; you do that by using the "ZAxisMapping 4 5" option.  You
*could* map the wheel to different buttons, but that breaks compatibility
with lots of other programs that assume wheels are mapped to buttons 4 and
5.  I think XFree 4.x also maps wheels to buttons 4 and 5, but I'm not
sure if one needs to enable that explicitely like XFree 3.3.6 or not.  My
XF86Config's pointer section is setup as:

   Section "Pointer"
       Protocol    "MouseManPlusPS/2"
       Device      "/dev/psaux"
       ZAxisMapping 4 5
   #    Emulate3Buttons
   #    Emulate3Timeout    50

   # ChordMiddle is an option for some 3-button Logitech mice

   #    ChordMiddle

   EndSection

The application you're using needs to understand that buttons 4 and 5 are
wheels in order for this to work.  All GTK apps work, and the newer KDE,
too, I think.  For others, you can translate buttons 4 and 5 to keyboard
events or something else to emulate wheel-like actions; you can do this
using the `imwheel` program.  You will need to configure `imwheel` to work
with the apps you want wheels to work; configurations for many popular
apps come with the imwheel package.

as for the extra buttons on your MS mouse, I've read you can map them to
buttons 6, 7, and onward, but I'm not sure how that's accomplished.

-Mark


On Wed, 27 Mar 2002, Peter D. Lutz wrote:

> Greetings.
> I have just replaced an ancient two button mouse with a fancy new
> Microsoft Trackball Optical.  Is there an easy way to make use of the
> extra features, roller wheel and 5 buttons, on my Debian 2.2.14 kernel?
> As it sits, it acts like the dumb mouse it replaced, two buttons and
> an emulated third if the first two are pressed together.
> I have tried mseconfig, but none of the settings I could find did any
> more than just make the ball crazy and prevent the buttons from
> working.
> Any help would be appreciated.
> Thank you.
> --
> Peter Lutz AA6AV
> Debian Linux 2.2
>

--
Mark K. Kim
http://www.cbreak.org/
PGP key available upon request.



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