[ale] SuSe and Scrollwheel

[Dow Hurst]

The problem at this point with the 7 buttons is that the 
XFree mouse driver doesn't handle that many buttons 
correctly by default and is just assigning the signal to the 
same event.  I worked on my wife's MS Optical Trackball 
which has 5 buttons and a scroll wheel for 7 total buttons 
in XFree's viewpoint.  I played with arranging the buttons 
using xmodmap in a bunch of different ways and also tried 
both mouse drivers that would see the trackball.  Only the 
more advanced driver and one combination of buttons made the 
trackball useful.  I have a left mouse button for selection 
ops.  A middle button for pasting on the scroll wheel.  A 
button for right click type events such as displaying a 
menu.  Two further right buttons, one that acts like the 
right button and one that is useless by not being assigned. 
  The scroll wheel works as buttons 4 and 5 due to the 
reassignment of buttons to events the driver understands. 
Try rearranging and getting button event 6 and 7 mapped to 
your physical buttons.  Start thinking of XFree button 
events getting mapped to physical buttons on the mouse.  So, 
you really need to know what the physical button numerical 
order is for your mouse.  You discover that by playing with 
xmodmap to map out which button is physically, or 
"electronically" identified as 1, 2, or so on.  Right now 
you have 1-1, 2-2, 3-3, and so on.  The best examples are on 
the XFree site under mouse configuration examples for the 
version of XFree that your using.  I'd go there and study 
the examples to get button events 6 and 7 placed correctly.

I had a GE 9 event optical mouse with dual scroll wheels. 
Depending on how I reassigned the buttons, I could get 
reasonable functionality such as left, right, middle, and 
single scroll wheel functions.  The second scroll wheel 
events just weren't supported under XFree correctly at the 
time I was working on this, so that scroll wheel would 
either duplicate the first one or act weird depending on the 
mapping.  That would have been XFree 4.0 and the IMP/S 2 
driver at least under SuSE 8.1. The Windows device specific 
driver understands and provides more functionality for the 
device than the XFree generic mouse drivers such as XY 
scrolling.  This is an area that needs work.
Dow



Michael D. Hirsch wrote:
> On Tuesday 10 February 2004 05:41 pm, Dow Hurst wrote:
> 
>>You can remap the mouse keys via a small script when you log
>>in.  Here is an example to get a Microsoft 5 button
>>trackball to work and set my dpms setting at the same time
>>when I would log into KDE.
>>
>>#!/bin/sh
>>xset dpms 900 1000 1100
>>xmodmap -e "pointer = 1 6 7 3 2 4 5"
>>exit
> 
> 
> Cool.  I didn't know about the pointer command in xmodmap.  Can I use this on 
> my 7 button mouse?  I just realized that my USB Microsoft Intellimouse has 
> two buttons I never use.  It has the standard 5 buttons (Left, Right, middle, 
> scrull up, scroll down) but there are two more buttons under my thumb.  It 
> there a way to map them?
> 
> I've run xev to watch the X events, and I can't tell them apart:
> Real button 3:
> ButtonPress event, serial 27, synthetic NO, window 0x8600001,
>     root 0x3f, subw 0x0, time 1901077568, (54,174), root:(58,505),
>     state 0x10, button 3, same_screen YES
> 
> ButtonRelease event, serial 27, synthetic NO, window 0x8600001,
>     root 0x3f, subw 0x0, time 1901077768, (54,174), root:(58,505),
>     state 0x410, button 3, same_screen YES
> 
> Button 6:
> ButtonPress event, serial 27, synthetic NO, window 0x8600001,
>     root 0x3f, subw 0x0, time 1901083912, (54,174), root:(58,505),
>     state 0x10, button 3, same_screen YES
> 
> ButtonRelease event, serial 27, synthetic NO, window 0x8600001,
>     root 0x3f, subw 0x0, time 1901084088, (54,174), root:(58,505),
>     state 0x410, button 3, same_screen YES
> 
> It there a way to do anything with these buttons?
> 
> Michael
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Ale mailing list
> Ale at ale.org
> http://www.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
> 

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Dow Hurst                  Office: 770-499-3428            *
Systems Support Specialist    Fax: 770-423-6744            *
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Chemistry Department SC428  Email:   dhurst at kennesaw.edu   *
Kennesaw State University         Dow.Hurst at mindspring.com *
Kennesaw, GA 30144                                         *
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