Red Hat 9 refers a number of times to 3 button mouses (mice?), and even to some sort of mythical "2 button mouse" that can miraculously be made to perform as if it had 3 buttons.

Well, what about those of us that have 5 buttons on our damn mouses? Plus a wheel?! I have a Microsoft Optical Intellimouse - it has the usual 2 buttons on the top (plus a wheel that is also a button) and, additionally, a button on either side; I've gotten very used to using these buttons to navigate web pages (they function as forward/back buttons) and now, it seems, they are unsupported by Linux, or at least Red Hat, or at least not officially.

Please help me kick my windows habit - give me my mouse back!

This would help you.

http://www.collie.net/mdlug/msg06895.html

I'll also try it when i get back home. Now I'm at work and only have 2 button wheel mouse.

Okay, this may not make your day, but you can get those to work with a little effort on your part. The upside is that once you figure it out, you'll be able to carry that across to a linux version, and even things like freeBSD and anything else that uses XFree86. The downside is that it's going to take a little reading and tinkering. I'd go through the motions myself to save you the trouble, but I only have a generic wheelmouse.

Basically, all you have to do is edit your /etc/X11/XF86Config file to see the buttons, and describe what they are for. XFree86 will work with all kinds of mice, so that shouldn't be a problem. The trick is finding out exactly what you need to do.

For this, I recommend stopping in at http://www.xfree86.org/ , then clicking Support, documentation, resources. From there, check out the xfree86 man pages. There is a link to configuring mouse support, http://www.xfree86.org/current/mouse.html

That should at least give you some idea of what you need to do. Hope that helps.

In fact, if you search these forums, you should find your answer. It was posted a while ago by a certain Acid Kewpie. I believe that the thread's title was exactly the same as this, actually.