I can't seem to map my Kensington Expert Mouse buttons for left-handed use after upgrading to Fedora Core 3. They were working as I wanted under Core 1. I wish to have the bottom right button producing left click events and the bottom left producing right click events.

My current xorg.conf :

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Mouse0"
Driver "mouse"
Option "Protocol" "Auto"
Option "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
Option "Buttons" "3"
EndSection

This has been tweaked by me. Originally buttons was "5" and this line was present:
Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"

Actually my kensington mouse has four buttons and one big ball (it is a trackball). I tried using a dozen different xmodmap commands to remap the buttons but nothing worked.

xmodmap -e "pointer = 5 4 3 2 1"
xmodmap -e "pointer = 1 2 5 3 4"
xmodmap -e "pointer = 3 2 1 4 5"
...etc...etc...etc...

xev tells me that my mouse is only generating three button events:

bottom-left reports button 1
top-left reports button 2
top-right reports button 2
bottom-right reports button 3

So X is apparently is treating my mouse as if it only has three buttons. This is why I tried modifying my xorg.conf as I did. But no luck. After doing so, xmodmap lets me reset my pointer for three buttons, but no combination seemes to give me the bottom-right behavior I want. (123, 132, 231, 213, 312, 321....no workee)

I've also tried setting "Buttons" to "4" and iterating the various xmodmap pointer values, but no luck there either.

Any advice?

Thanks,
Devin

this should let x know your mouse has 4 buttons as far as re mapping the buttons xmod should let you do that as well. The protocol is the culprit here.
good luck I hope this helps.
Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Mouse0"
Driver "mouse"
Option "ButtonNumber" "4"
Option "Buttons" "4"
Option "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
Option "Name" "Intellimouse_Explorer;ExplorerPS/2"
Option "Protocol" "ExplorerPS/2"
Option "Emulate3Buttons" "no"
EndSection

Thanks a lot for that, but it is to no avail. I'm getting the same results. Do you know what the ButtonNumber option is for? Is that supposed to specify the primary button, or some such thing?

Also, I'm interested to know what the gnome mouse preferences GUI does under the covers. When I select the "use left handed mouse" setting, none of my buttons are mapped to left-click. Instead, the bottom-left and bottom-right buttons fire right-clicks.

Anyone know of any other utilities that might be used to help my track this down?

The mystery continues....day four. I snagged my InputDevice settings from a clone of my old box. With core 1, I used these settings and then used xmodmap to set my Kensington Expert Mouse for left handed use (pointer = 3 2 1 4 5).

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Mouse0"
Driver "mouse"
Option "Protocol" "GlidePointPS/2"
Option "Device" "/dev/psaux"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
Option "Emulate3Buttons" "no"
EndSection

I've changed my core 3 distro to use these exact same settings (except that device is now /dev/input/mice), and now there seems to be no hope of remapping my mouse buttons properly. xev reports my right lower button to be "button 3" and my left lower button to be "button 1" so the xmodmap pointer values SHOULD work perfectly, as they did under core 1.

So the question is: what else has changed about the system that could cause this side effect? One major change is the move from xfree86 to xorg (pretty big change). Would it be worth my while to attempt to uninstall xorg and install xfree86?

I'm running under gnome. Could gnome be the gremlin?

God still only knows where the problem lies, but I suspect X.

For posterity's sake, here's what I finally did to solve the problem. I read somewhere that you can hand the generation of X mouse events over to GPM by changing your device entry in xorg.conf. I did this by changing my device definition to this:

Section "InputDevice"

Identifier "DevInputMice"
Driver "mouse"
Option "Protocol" "IMPS/2"
Option "Device" "/dev/gpmdata"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
Option "Emulate3Buttons" "no"
EndSection

I'm back in business.

I'm working with debian(sid) and I got the exact same problem that the starter of this thread had.
I followed your posts and did everything as it was mentioned above.
But still xfree86 recognizes only 3 of the 4 buttons (the upper 2 buttons are both reported as button 2 in xev).
I played around with nearly all available settings (buttons, ...) but nothing worked.
The thing is that that I really need those two buttons (which work perfectly under windows) because without them I would have to return to the evil empire


XF86config:

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Configured Mouse"
Driver "mouse"
Option "CorePointer"
Option "Device" "/dev/gpmdata"
Option "Protocol" "ImPS/2"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
Option "Emulate3Buttons" "no"
EndSection

gpm.conf:

device=/dev/input/mice
responsiveness=
repeat_type=raw
type=imps2
append="-B 4321"
sample_rate=

Done, just switched back from gpm to native x-mouse-stuff and changed protocol from imps2 to ExplorerPS2, now everything runs perfect.