I am running Red Hat Linux 4, and when i use the scroll wheel of my mouse to navigate web pages and such, I will randomly select things in the website. it will also mess around with my buffer from time to time (it seems like it is thinking i am pressing the left mouse button as well).
Is this a common problem, and/or does anyone know what i might do to stop this from happening? I have tried two different mice with the same behavior.


Thanks

If I use mine and push to hard, it IS a BUTTON. Depending on your configuration could be left, right, or both (middle/3rd) in interpretation. I tend to use it for scrolling with the mouse over the scroll bar. If it goes over code boxes, or flash / java applets it stops scrolling the webpage and starts interacting with the applets. Obviously not an issue in a text editor and other applications, but very annoying when browsing a webpage. Uninstall flash, uninstall java, issue resolved. Sort of. Just try scrolling on the borders and see if that helps.

Yes, there is a button if I depress the scroll wheel, but if I just scroll, my expected behavior is that text/links will NOT be selected while scrolling (this is how Windows works, and how I think even Linux SHOULD work, and DOES work for most other people i know). Of course, if my mouse is over a scroll bar, there is no text to select, so there is no issue. but ideally i'd like to stop this behavior entirely (the selecting of text/clicking of links, i mean) if possible.

Thanks

You might be using the wrong mouse driver. Or need some extra options to the modules to get things working the way you want. I know I had to feed psmouse and/or mousedev taptime and such for my laptops scratchpad. tpconfig and other options. mousedev.taptime=0 as a kernel parameter. same as modprobe mousedev taptime=0. I"m not sure of the syntax or verbage (so long ago), modinfo might help. But I can say mine doesn't have that behavior. Although occasionally it'll click and select text and that ends up in my address bar selections. Quite annoying if you keep a list of common visits there and just drop and click as needed. If it's a synaptic variant, you might try loading / using that synaptic driver for X. Mine's always been variant enough that that driver never quite worked for me. It was just simpler to disable the extras given the chance / choice.