HOWTO: getting your optical wireless intellimouse explorer to work in Slack
 

Many people, including me were having trouble getting their optical wireless intellimouse explorer working in Slackware. I browsed these forums and in a few hours i had my mouse working. What I've done here is put all the information I found in these forums in one thread, to save time, and make it easier for frustrated newbies. (like myself)

Info below origanly found in a post by: skog
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In your Xwindows config file, (located at /etc/X11/XF86Config) make sure the section called "InputDevice" that deals with your mouse looks like this:
~
Identifier "Mouse"
Driver "mouse"
Option "Protocol" "IMPS/2"
Option "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
Option "Buttons" "5"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
EndSection
~
The "Protocal" that this mouse must use is the"IMPS/2" protocal
The "Buttons" line describes how many buttons your mouse has. (Make all those buttons useful!)
The "ZAxisMapping" line i BELIEVE sets up the scroll wheel, although I'm not positive. Without this line however the scroll wheel did not work.

The "Device" describes where your mouse is located, this typicaly can cause problems.
A common problem area is not having the right path for the line:

Option "Device" "/dev/input/mice"

"What you need to do is cat the mouse devices in your /dev directory"
After entering one of the commands below, move your mouse, it should creat random characters over the screen. If this happens, thats the directory you should change the path under Option "Device" "path here." If you enter one of the commands below and it responds with no such device, then try a differant one, as that is not where you mouse is located.

cat /dev/mouse
cat /dev/input/mice
cat /dev/input/mouse0
cat /dev/usb/mice
cat /dev/usb/mouse0
-------------------------
After making sure i had my XF86Config file set up properly, the mouse would not move on a vertical axis, only horizontal. Below, is how I fixed this:

Info below origanly found in a post by mr_nohj
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To permanantly fix this problem, we need to change the file that dictates what modules are loaded at boot. This file is located at /etc/rc.d/rc.modules. In this file, two lines must be uncommented to load the proper modules during boot. Uncomment the follwing lines by removing the # character

#/sbin/modprobe hid
#/sbin/modprobe usbmouse
------------

Thats how I managed to get my mouse up and running. If you have questions chances are I WILL NOT be able to answer them, as this thread simply compiles what I've found into one thread.

I hope this helps to answer some questions, and as always im sure most of us greatly appreciate the help granted, and given to us by those experts. Thanks guys

Welcome to LQ nullz0r - nice first post, and I'm glad you got everything to work in your rig. As for the ZAxisMapping, yes, that is associated with the scroll wheel -- J.W.

Ditto, great post mate :).

For those of you with a 5 button mouse and a scroll wheel - this is a 7 button mouse (5 buttons + Wheel Up + Wheel Down = 7). Here is the relevant section from my xorg.conf

Identifier "Mouse1"
Driver "mouse"
Option "Protocol" "ExplorerPS/2"
Option "Device" "/dev/psaux"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "6 7"

(I didn't put ' Option "Buttons" "7" ' - seems it is not required in this case)

I also run

xmodmap -e "pointer = 1 2 3 6 7 4 5"

To switch the buttons round the right way.

Try running "xev" in a terminal to check all your buttons are being detected first!

Again, great first post, hope it helps others!

Steve

In ZAxisMapping, what does 4 5 means exactly?

if, like me, you have a three button mouse (left, right, and scroll click) with a scroll (up and down), your mouse has five different 'click' events associated with it. if you scroll up it is interpreted as a click on a different button, and the same goes for scrolling down.

as far as the .conf file is concerned, these buttons are buttons 4 and 5.

so, if you say
Option "Buttons" "5"
you are letting it know there are the two extra scroll 'buttons' being used, making a total of five for your mouse

and then
Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
is defining which buttons are controlling the scroll, in this case 4 and 5.

my problem is that i have a microsoft mouse with a horizontal scroll, aswell as the standard vertical scroll, but this is not recognised in the same way.

theoretically i could put
Option "Buttons" "7"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5 6 7"
but this doesn't work.

it does work with some mice aparantly, looking at this information i got from somewhere:

Option "ZAxisMapping" "X"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "Y"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "N1 N2"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "N1 N2 N3 N4"
Set the mapping for the Z axis (wheel) motion to buttons or another axis
(X or Y). Button number N1 is mapped to the negative Z axis motion and
button number N2 is mapped to the positive Z axis motion. For mice with two
wheels, four button numbers can be specified, with the negative and positive
motion of the second wheel mapped respectively to buttons number N3 and N4.
Default: no mapping.

but i have read about a few problems with the microsoft scroll in linux, not yet working easily/at all.

i'm still looking into it myself, but if anyone else has a suggestion, or link, i'd be grateful.

hope this helps..... though you may have already found information on this question.

- andrew