Environment: OpenSUSE 15.3 recently brought up to latest patches.

I just purchased a Kensington Expert Mouse Wireless Trackball. The bluetooth dongle is recognized when I plug it in (messages are seen in /var/log/messages when the USB dongle/tranceiver is plugged and unplugged). Pressing all four mouse buttons appears to get the mouse to sync up with the tranceiver just fine with the LED blinking blue as the instruction "manual" says is the correct result. The pointer never moves, though. I'm running the gpm service so dropping to a console (Ctrl-Alt-F1) should allow me to move the cursor around but... no joy there either.

The KDE System Settings sees no Bluetooth devices so nothing to setup, I guess.

I ran "lsusb" and it was detected and seen as a "Kensington Expert Mouse TB".

Has anyone successfully used this device with Linux?

If so, what, if anything, special did you have to do to get it to work? (My guess is a change to the mouse type change in xorg.conf, xorg.conf.d/, and/or /etc/sysconfig/mouse? But change it to what?)

I'd love to get this device working. Anything that cuts down on the cable snarl on my desk is a huge plus.

TIA...


Aside: I had an Adesso wireless mouse a little over a year ago and it wasn't even six months before it stopped making horizontal mouse movement and the adjustable scrolling sensitivity stopped working (that feature died fairly early but was not a show stopper). It did, to its credit, work immediately out of the box---no muss, no fuss, no additional drivers---just a little time spent tweaking button mapping with xmodmap. I chose this Kensington as I had one of the old grayish-beige PS2 Kensington Expert Mouse trackballs and it lasted for over a decade before it croaked.

From a quick search the mouse has two modes, bluetooth and 2.4GHz modes. The 2.4 GHz mode is used with the USB dongle so make sure the mode switch on the bottom is in the correct position. If the switch is in the correct position I am out of ideas.

Pressing all four buttions is used for bluetooth paring but since your using the 2.4GHz mode should not do anything as far as I can tell. With 2.4GHz mode enabled it should just work.

Otherwise the system with the dongle inserted should recognize the trackball as an ordinary USB mouse. In addition to take advantage of all the buttons you will probably need to setup xmodmap as desired.

It was the switch setting. I could have sworn I tried both, though. (This is what happens after a long day and you start trying out new hardware at midnight.)

I'll be shuffling off to see if I can find my old Kensington mouse button setting script. It should get me close to the settings I want but I'm prepared to spend some quality time with xev and xmodmap if needed.

Thanks... (Marking this as solved)