I'm using RedHat 9 on a Dell M70 Laptop. Its got a trackpad built in, though most of the time I use an external wireless USB mouse, a "Microsoft Wireless Intellimouse Explorer 2.0". Very nice. If I don't havet the mouse plugged in I can always use the trackpad.

I start out with the following in my XF86Config file:

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Mouse0"
Driver "mouse"
Option "Protocol" "PS/2"
Option "Device" "/dev/psaux"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
Option "Emulate3Buttons" "no"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "DevInputMice"
Driver "mouse"
Option "Protocol" "IMPS/2"
Option "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
Option "Emulate3Buttons" "no"
EndSection

I wanted to get the extra thumb buttons on the mouse working with FireFox. So I trolled the web and changed these as follows:

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Mouse0"
Driver "mouse"
Option "Protocol" "PS/2"
Option "Device" "/dev/psaux"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "6 7"
Option "Emulate3Buttons" "no"
Option "Buttons" "7"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "DevInputMice"
Driver "mouse"
Option "Protocol" "ExplorerPS/2"
Option "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "6 7"
Option "Emulate3Buttons" "no"
Option "Buttons" "7"
EndSection

This all does what you would expect. Note that none of the other posters talked about a second mouse, so I've made the buttons and ZAxisMapping changes to both mice in attempts to resolve errors and get this working.

Anyway, now if I test the configuration with xev I get mouse button 6 from scrolling "up", mouse button 7 from scrolling the wheel "down", 5 from the small forward thumb button and 4 from the larger back thumb button.

Now the only step is to swap the 4 5 and 6 7 functions. Without this the forward/back buttons scroll the page and the wheel does forward/back.

So I try xmodmap as follows:

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

No errors and xmodmap -pp produces:

>xmodmap -pp
There are 7 pointer buttons defined.

Physical Button
Button Code
1 1
2 2
3 3
4 6
5 7
6 4
7 5

as you'd expect. Yet when I test with xev or simply try with FireFox, none of the buttons have changed.

I thought maybe the command wasn't being issued early enough or something. I'm using KDE, so I added the following:

>pwd
/root/.kde/Autostart
>cat xmodmap
#!/bin/sh
/usr/X11R6/bin/xmodmap -e "pointer = 1 2 3 6 7 4 5"
[root@dhcp8:~/.kde/Autostart]

Yes its marked as executable. Yes I'm logged in as root. After I boot the system, I get the expected result as above from xmodmap -pp. Yet the mouse buttons remain unchanged as confirmed by xev.

Not sure what is going on. Any suggestions?