Hello, I have a question regarding the scroll button on my mouse.
The scroll button works great, for going up and down, but in windows, i can click the middle rolly thing, and then move the mouse up and down, and it will scroll that way. however, when i click it in linux, it does a google search of the word i clicked on or something else seemingly random. How do i reconfigure this?

I use mandrake 10 official if that helps.

thanks,
-pinkey

Windows uses a two-button mouse; left button for select, right for context menu. Support for the middle button was bolted-on, and most mouse drivers reimplement the middle button to do something more useful than the no-op it usually did.

In Linux, the left button is traditionally used for select-and-copy, the middle button for paste, and the right button for a context menu. This isn't usually messed around with, although various web applications tend to use the middle button for other things (eg. I have Firefox open hyperlinks in a new tab).

If you want to change this behaviour, look at utilities like xmodmap, and the Buttons setting in the XF86Config file.

Hope that helps,

—Robert J. Lee

oh, that makes sense, thanks for the help!

-pink

By the way, isn't Xorg.conf now the reigning X11 package instead of XF86Config?

... and then there is the center-button, scroll wheel ...

... some of us have an eraser-key pointer and three buttons. The center button is click-n-hold to activate wheel-emulation or similar scrolling ...

How do we tell X11 in general, and other apps like evolution, firefox, openOffice, and such in specific that we want center-button scrolling?

Thanks,
~~~ 0;-Dan

You just posted in a 5 years old topic, xfree86 was the main server back then.