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Microsoft® Trackball Explorer and Mandrake Linux

Greetings,

I am a newb to the Linux OS, but I'm not helpless ;)

Microsoft® Trackball Explorer and Mandrake Linux, I have it attached via USB port, however, I can not use my 'back' and 'forward' buttons any more, Basically, for those of you unfamiliar with the peripheral device, it is essentially a 5 button mouse, with a trackball, and the 2nd mouse button being a wheel. I have the wheel working but I would really like to get the other two buttons operational... if not as 'back' and 'forward' then as something else.

I have gone through the K Menu --> Conifiguration --> Config Your Computer --> DrakHardware --> Mouse..

However, the only options available to me are max three buttons.

Distro: Mandrake 9.2 ( LILO Dual Boot with winXP )
Desk Enviro: KDE 3.1
System: Dell Inspiron 4150, 1.7 P4-mobile, 256mb RAM, 30GB HDD, ATI Radeon 7500 32 MB.

Anyone come across a solution I would be more than happy to recieve it. I've searched through google/linux and I couldn't find anything... seperately I checked mandrakes own hardware support page to no avail...

Regards,

1beb

Greetings,

I don't have your exact answer but I can say the solution lies somewhere in your /etc/X11/XF86Config. I have a wheel mouse and this gets it wheeling:

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Mouse0"
Option "mouse"
Option "Protocol" "IMPS/2"
Option "Device" "/dev/mouse"
Option "Resolution" "100"
Option "Buttons" "5"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
Option "Emulate3Buttons" "off"
EndSection

Don't expect it to work for your mouse, it is only a guide, a place to start looking.

Yes, I've read other post's the define the use of that file to cause the wheel to work... however, my problem seems slightly different. I'm not exactly sure how I would MAP two extra mouse buttons to the back and forward becuase I'm not sure if back and forward are defined in the same manner across all of the browsers. Whereas in windows it is set... or seemingly so, because of the integration of IE into the OS... that's what makes sense to me but I could be wrong...

Regards,

1beb

Something interesting to note... is that Mandrake actually recognizes the fact that I have 7 buttons or at least it knows that they are there. But it doesn't know how to use them.

In options Mandrake Control Center -- > Hardware --> Detected Hardware --> Mouse --> USB Mouse

This is what I see

Code:

Information 



Old device file: ‎/dev/usbmouse



Name: ‎Microsoft Explorer



Number of buttons: ‎7



Type: ‎USB

It's a step in the right direction I guess. I haven't been able to find anything about anyone else having a similar set up... when I google it.. .the only things that come up are people having problems with their mouse wheel not working...

/etc/X11/XF86Config

Code:

Section "InputDevice"

    Identifier "Mouse1"

    Driver "mouse"

    Option "Protocol" "ExplorerPS/2"

    Option "Device" "/dev/usbmouse"

    Option "ZAxisMapping" "6 7"

EndSection



Section "InputDevice"

    Identifier "Mouse2"

    Driver "mouse"

    Option "Protocol" "PS/2"

    Option "Device" "/dev/psaux"

    Option "Emulate3Buttons"

    Option "Emulate3Timeout" "50"

EndSection





Section "ServerLayout"

    Identifier "layout1"

    InputDevice "Keyboard1" "CoreKeyboard"

    InputDevice "Mouse1" "CorePointer"

    InputDevice "Mouse2" "SendCoreEvents"

    Screen "screen1"

EndSection

On a deeper inspection of the file that you had mentioned... This is what I found. It has brought me to another line of questions regarding my problem...

Firstly, are there any other configuration files that are specific to the mouse? Are they tangibly editable, meaning, will I be able to look at them and possibly understand what the config settings are and or how to change them?

I think I'm going to give up soon... it's really only a back and forward button I guess...

Regards,

1beb

Here are some other related things that I have found on my linux distro if they could be any help at all

/etc/sysconfig/mouse.

Code:

MOUSETYPE=ps/2

XMOUSETYPE=ExplorerPS/2

FULLNAME="USB|Microsoft Explorer"

XEMU3=no

WHEEL=yes

device=usbmouse

/ect/sysconfig/usb

Code:

# -*- Mode: sh -*-

# Set this to no if you don't want USB.

USB=yes



# This will force to load the usb system and keyboard at the early

# process of the boot proces

KEYBOARD_AT_BOOT=no



# Some driver you may want to force the load, normally all of this is

# done by the hotplug package.

MOUSE=no

KEYBOARD=no

STORAGE=no

VISOR=no

PRINTER=no