mouse issues with distros

not sure where this belongs so i'll put it here. i have a logitech mx700 mouse that has two thumb buttons that, in mandriva, they are used to go to the previous and next web pages, respectively. actually, in mandriva, all the buttons function like they're supposed to. now, in suse, debian, fedora, slackware, these buttons don't work at all. i bet there's a way to configure that, i just dont' know how. i bet it has to do with the xorg.conf file - where you can define the number of buttons your mouse has and define which ones do z axis mapping. can someone please give more insight on how to configure this? thanks!

In XF86Config add the option Buttons and change ZAxisMapping to "6 7"

Section "InputDevice"
  Driver       "mouse"
  Identifier   "Mouse[1]"
  Option       "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
  Option       "Name" "Logitech USB RECEIVER"
  Option       "Protocol" "explorerps/2"
  Option       "Vendor" "Sysp"
  Option       "Buttons" "7"
  Option       "ZAxisMapping" "6 7"
EndSection

I've created a document: ~/.kde/Autostart/mouse.sh

/usr/X11R6/bin/xmodmap -e "pointer = 1 2 3 6 7 4 5"

Perhaps that could be done with .Xmodmap as well

i tried exactly what you said (except for that last part), and what happened is my thumb buttons acted like a scroll wheel. will that last part fix that?

I think you've figured out by now that the last part does fix that
It actually replaces the buttons 4&5 for 6&7

wow - that worked like a charm! thanks for that reply!

OK this fixed the problem for my Mandriva and Suse, but not for Debian and Slackware. Any ideas why??? the only think i noticed is that the Debian uses an XF86Config-4 file rather than a xorg.conf. What does it matter?

Well, my first guess would be that you don't use KDE on Debian and Slackware. I bet it will work when you run ~/.kde/Autostart/mouse.sh manually

Actually I do run KDE on both. And I should correct myself - it does work with Slackware 10.2, but not with Debian. I will try running it manually and see what happens.