How do I make my mouse fully functional?

[bobleny]

My mouse has a left click, right click, a center wheel clicker, a forward click and a backward click. The left right and center work fine but the other two buttons don't.

In case I'm not clear, the back button, makes you go back one page. For example, say you do a search at yahoo.com, you click on the first link, look at the page a bit, only to find it wasn't what you wanted. You would use the back button on the mouse to take you back to your search results. The back button takes you back one page in your history. This goes the same for folders on your computer.

The forward button does the same thing, only in reverse.

How do I make these other two buttons work?

Thanks!

[Chauncey]

Re: How do I make my mouse fully functional?

try searching for "5 button mouse support"
There are a lot of posts on this topic, a lot of different suggestions.

I haven't tried them all (I haven't been motivated enough ) but the answer has to be there.

I wish Kubuntu would just support these mice (I mean, really, who's just using a $5 POS 3-button mouse these days )

good luck

[OuchOfDeath]

Re: How do I make my mouse fully functional?

Heh, I answered the same question a few days ago.

http://kubuntuforums.net/forums/index.php?topic=11989.0

Konqueror doesn't make use of the extra 2 mouse buttons, so you'll have to use another browser like Firefox or Opera to use them.

[Chauncey]

Re: How do I make my mouse fully functional?

It just seems dumb to me.

I can go to SYSTEM SETTINGS and select the exact keyboard I'm using (with volume wheel, media controls, etc) but the mouse that came with it? nada!

All griping aside...
I just found this:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ManyButtonsMouseHowto

[bobleny]

Re: How do I make my mouse fully functional?

Why does that seem more complicated then what ouchofdeath posted!?

[Chauncey]

Re: How do I make my mouse fully functional?

When I changed "mouse" to "evdev" (as suggested in the thread linked by OuchOfDeath) it froze X (why it's important to backup).

The entry at help.ubuntu.com looks complicated, but in my (limited) experience with Linux, the more complicated way is usually the right way

Plus: I have a 4 button mouse (actually a 6 button, the way X sees it -- see help.ubuntu) and some people have mice with many, many more buttons.

[OuchOfDeath]

Re: How do I make my mouse fully functional?

Why does that seem more complicated then what ouchofdeath posted!?

Because his is tweaking the mouse driver to make use of the extra buttons, what I posted is to use the evdev driver instead which is made to make use of many more input buttons.

The entry at help.ubuntu.com looks complicated, but in my (limited) experience with Linux, the more complicated way is usually the right way

Not true, sometimes the easiest way is the best, like with evdev. Before I had to do what your link pointed to make use of the extra 2 mouse buttons, but then I found out about the evdev driver and it's simply a matter of editing one word to make the mouse buttons work.

[bobleny]

Re: How do I make my mouse fully functional?

Grr...

When I follow your instructions, I get this error:

bob@George:~$ sudo kate /etc/X11/xorg.conf
Password:
X Error: BadDevice, invalid or uninitialized input device 168
 Major opcode: 145
 Minor opcode: 3
 Resource id: 0x0
Failed to open device
X Error: BadDevice, invalid or uninitialized input device 168
 Major opcode: 145
 Minor opcode: 3
 Resource id: 0x0
Failed to open device

[Chauncey]

Re: How do I make my mouse fully functional?

I found this on another post (http://kubuntuforums.net/forums/index.php?topic=12558.0):

Quote
X Error: BadDevice, invalid or uninitialized input device 166...

This is from wacom crap in the xorg.conf.
How to fix:
X Error: BadDevice, invalid or uninitialized input device 168
http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=212025

(Usually, I just right-click on xorg.conf and select ACTIONS>EDIT AS ROOT so I don't have to see all of that)

If just switching "mouse" to "evdev" works for you, by all means do that. I like things to be simple, too. If, however, you're like me and X hangs on startup, you may have to do it the hard way.


On that note:
OuchOfDeath, am I missing something?
Here is what I have after changing the driver:

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Configured Mouse"
Driver "evdev"
Option "CorePointer"
Option "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
Option "Protocol" "ExplorerPS/2"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
Option "Emulate3Buttons" "true"
EndSection

What else do I need to change, and how do I configure the new buttons once (if) this works?

[bobleny]

Re: How do I make my mouse fully functional?

I take it, it still didn't work after you did the wacom thing?

[Chauncey]

Re: How do I make my mouse fully functional?

As far as I know, the Wacom thing is harmless. You only need to fix it if you really don't want to see those error messages. I'm a GUI man, myself, so I never see them unless I'm already in the terminal. I don't think they have anything to do with the extra buttons on your mouse.

[bobleny]

Re: How do I make my mouse fully functional?

I say you got lucky.... When I changed my mouse to "evdev", my computer no longer started... I fix it though....

I'm just going to do the ubuntu way you mentioned above....

Thanks!