New Mouse

[ME]

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

I have been migrating over to Debian 3.0 (testing) and it has XF86 v4. It
seems that this version offers support for the mouse wheel. However, I use
the tty based consoles in addition to the graphics consoles and like
gpm. There are problems with making the mouse wheel work while gpm is
running and using XF86 v4's config settings. I found a few web pages on
this a while back. One solution is to disable gpm and only allow X to have
the mouse. Another was to DL, compile, and install a mod to the gpm src
tree that allowed for special dev files (I think they were fifo type) in
the dev dir to be available to Xf86 v4 to read mouse wheel events. I have
not gone through that much trouble yet as the wheel is not *that*
important to me.

Debian 2.2 still ships with XF86 v3 AFAIK. I am not sure if X v3 supports
the wheel. I seem to recall thst you can at least get the wheel to act as
a center button with v3, but dont recall the rotation being used, but this
memory has holes.

-ME

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