tjl2.com

A place to store useful stuff

Site Navigation

Home  |  Linux System Admin  |  Personal  |  Work Related  |  Scripts  |  Downloads  | 

Buy me a pint?


 

[UBUNTU 6.06] How to configure extra buttons on a Logitech Cordless Optical mouse

On my desktop system, I have the Logitech Ultra X Cordless Desktop keyboard and mouse bundle. After installing Ubuntu, the mouse's scrollwheel worked OK, but the thumb-buttons that are configured on Windows as back and forward buttons (in a browser) didn't work. The method for making these buttons work in Ubuntu 6.06 is simpler than the steps outlined in the guide for Ubuntu 5.10 . The steps below will allow you to configure these two thumb buttons to provide back & forward actions in Firefox.

Modifying xorg.conf

  • The first thing you need to do is make some modifications to the X.org configuration file that the Ubuntu installer will have automatically generated. Open up the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file in a text editor as root:

    sudo vi /etc/X11/xorg.conf

  • Within this file, find the InputDevice section for your mouse. In my original xorg.conf file, my configuration looked like this: 
    Section "InputDevice"
              Identifier      "Configured Mouse"
              Driver          "mouse"
              Option          "CorePointer"
              Option          "Device"                "/dev/input/mice"
              Option          "Protocol"              "ImPS/2"
              Option          "Emulate3Buttons"       "true"
              Option          "ZAxisMapping"          "4 5"
              EndSection
    This configuration will not allow the thumb buttons to work (I couldn't get it to anyway).
  • These settings need to be tweaked a little by adding a line and changing some of the existing ones so that you end up with the following InputDevice settings: 
    Section "InputDevice"
              Identifier      "Configured Mouse"
              Driver          "mouse"
              Option          "CorePointer"
              Option          "Device"                "/dev/input/mice"
              Option          "Protocol"              "ExplorerPS/2"
              Option          "Emulate3Buttons"       "false"
              Option          "Buttons"               "9"
              Option          "ZAxisMapping"          "4 5"
              Option          "ButtonMapping"         "1 2 3 6 7"
              EndSection
  • Save your changes to this file, then restart the X server by pressing CTRL+ALT+Backspace. Once you log back in, you should find that you can now move backwards and forwards through pages in Firefox.

This how-to assumes that you are using standard Gnome-based Ubuntu (i.e.: what you get after doing a standard installation). It should work with other Ubuntu derivatives such as Kubuntu or Xubuntu, as all changes are to X server settings and not Gnome-specific.

top