I am ussing a Kensingto Optical Elite. To get the wheel to work I hae to use ZAxisMapping as 4 5 not 6 7. I had the scroller working before I set of imwheelrc, but the right side button would act as right click and the left button would act as middle click, however when I used imwheel I got theleft button to be set as Left and the right button to be set as Right, the scroll wheel is Up/Down. The problem I am having is that after setting up my .imwheelrc just as it says and running: imwheel -k -b "67" the left side button is the same as scroll up and the right side button is the same as scroll down, not forward and back. The scroll wheel still works. I then tried imwheel -k -b "45" and then the side buttons just stop working. Does anyone know how to fix this?

thanks in advance,
spore

NEW >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
I fixed the problem after reading the man page by simply ommitting the -b 67 option so that the mapping is in the standard order of 456789

Important notes about how imwheel actually works:

From the manpage:

Index Interpreted As Button Number
1 Wheel Up 4
2 Wheel Down 5
3 Wheel Left 6
4 Wheel Right 7
5 Thumb Button 1 8
6 Thumb Button 2 9


This defines how the -b "whatever" string is interpreted. using "Up" and "Down" in my .imwheelrc and -b "67" results in 6 and 7 being mapped to "Up" and "Down", which means they scroll the same as my mouse wheel is doing. The proper way to do this is with "Left" and "Right" or presumably (I haven't tried) "Button 1" and "Button 2" in your .imwheelrc and -b "0067" in your arguments to imwheel.

hmm.. i was trying to install imwheel in SuSE 9.1 and i get this while trying to install:
"configure: error: IMWheel depends on the X11 libraries!"
i looked it up and found some forum that said this happens because SuSE 9.1 uses xorg instead of XFree86... any idea if i can get this to work?
Thanks

Hello, very nice HOW TO.
Just wanted to let you know how mine went. I just bought a logitech MX310. I changed the config to what you listed and entered xmodmap -e "pointer = 1 2 3 6 7 4 5" as root and that was it. All ran fine. Right, left, middles click, scroll wheel and the 2 side buttons (page forward and reverse).

It also work with Q3 as well.

Thanks again,
Jason -aka- Crane

You shouldn't even need imwheel anymore for most things (mozilla/firefox for ex) but if you want to get it working look at how Gentoo did/does it. It might actually be pulling in xfree 4.3.0 sources... no idea.

hmm I don't need imwheel to get the side buttons to work in mozilla firefox?? How do I do it then, because they don't by default.
By the way.. I found out that imwheel comes with SuSE and I already had it installed (doh!). But I followed those instructions and they didn't work. xev shows me different actions for all buttons though, so I have no idea why it isn't working..

Very good how-to, bluephile. To guarantee your effort an eternal life, consider entering it in the LQ wiki. The mouse page is at http://wiki.linuxquestions.org/wiki/Mouse .

-scapade

you seem to know a lot about this... =D .. maybe you can help me with my problems (intellimouse explorer 4.0 of course) ...

i would love to have my "tilt thingie" working too... i've googled for 3 days now (spent hours each day just on this topic) .. and tried several different things on my own... seems to be no way to get the tilt wheel working =/ ... closest i've gotten is to get it to work when i tilt it to the right using 'evrouter' ... but to the left doesn't work at all.. and if i bind the right tilt to something and tilt it to the left once (even though nothing is detected when i do it) ... evrouter is shut down .. ..

also.. i'd like to have the mousewheel work properly.. it works without no problem.. but it has mousewheel acceleration.. i'd like to get rid of it ... it did the same thing in windows xp... and i could not use the mousewheel in quake3 since it was so buggy and only worked at some times ... although, after i installed the intellipoint drivers and turned off the option "use mousewheel acceleration" ... it worked perfectly in quake3 also... i'd like to do the same in linux.. =/

Thanks, scapade! Seems you put a refrence in there for me. I appreciate it.

zarac:

I don't know anything about your mouse, but I'll see if I can help. First, make sure that you have the number of buttons set high enough in your X config. Then, try using xev to find what comes out for wheel-tilting. lotheac reported earlier that it did not show up, but perhaps he only had 7 buttons configured.

I don't have any experience with scroll acceleration, either. Mouse settings like that would normally be set via 'xset,' so you might want to hunt around in that manpage.


phox:

Please share how to get firefox to read side buttons without the rather messy imwheel!

Hi,
Great howto! However, I couldn't manage to get side buttons working, neither when configured for all 9 buttons nor when configured as you say. I'm using Fedora Core 2 and, in case it matters, when I cat /dev/input/mice, I get chars printed to the screen for all buttons and wheels except for the side buttons.
Still, thanks for the guide, and hope someone can help...

PS: Got the "cat /dev/input/mice" idea from a joystick thread recommending to cat /dev/js0 to test the joystick. I guess getting something there from side buttons doesn't depend on X11 conf, does it?

I'm not sure that that's a reliable method. After the first click I don't seem to get any output in my terminal for clicking the left (primary) mouse button. I suppose it has something to do with how the terminal renders the raw data.

Could you post the relevant section of your X config file? I assume that xev didn't report anything for the side buttons ...

First of all, thanks for the help!
I have a 9 button, 2 wheel "a4tech 5D" mouse. Xev doesn't do anything when I click the side buttons. My xmodmap is Thanks!

PS: In my case, putting the imwheel and xmodmap scripts in /etc/X11/initrc/xinitrc.d doesnt work in my fedora 2

bluephile, thanks =D ... what mouse i'm using? .. intellimouse explorer 4.0 ... hmm.. i figured out somewhat what the problem was/is .... i think the ime4.0 has it on by default, and also something that doesn't allow me to move the mouse and scroll the wheel at the same time... because when i do that..it doens't pick up the wheel motion... although.. if i boot up my computer in windows... and then restart into linux (without turning the power off) ... then it works to scroll the wheel while i move the mouse... bet microsoft did that on purpous =D ...

i ended up buying a new mouse.. a logitech mx500... not only because of that.. but becuase the ime4.0 seems to be capped at 100hz.. (not even 125hz which the default usb is) ... not even with the kernel hack to run usb at 500hz i cannot get it above 100hz.... and neither with the ps/2 adapter.. still 100hz... exactly the same thing happens in windows... i've had several mice plugged in at the same time... ime3+ime4+mx500 ... the ime3 and the mx500 both work with the 500hz usb tweak.. but again... the ime4 is locked to 100hz... so .. it's a crappy mouse for gamers =D ...

this sort of worked for me. I have a wireless intellimouse, don't really know the model, it's blue though. It has a scroll wheel, but no side buttons, nothing too fancy. The scroll seems to work, but if i roll the scroll wheel too fast, it hits my back button my my firefox window. That's not acceptable.

I managed to get xmodmap and imwheel working. Turns out I hadn't chmod-ed the scripts...