Ok I have a Kensington Mouse-in-a-Box Optical Pro. Get that? Good. It runs fine and I got the scroll wheel to work. Buuuuttttt....It has two side buttons like an Intellimouse but better . I'm a recent convert from Windows XP where those buttons worked as back and forward buttons in IE. I was wondering if there's anyone out there in Linux land that may know how I would go about doing this, if it's even possible. And remember, I'm an ultra linux newb. I just installed Slack 9 two nights ago

well, this might get more complicated than you would like. you can look up what keyboard shortcut buttons your browser uses for the back\forward buttons and then you can assign the mouse buttons to emulate those keys by editing your XF86Config file. i don't know what the syntax is for XF86Config is (i used to, but it changed and i never read up on the new syntax) and i'm not gonna look it up for you (if i already knew it i would tell you). i'm not trying to be mean or anything, i'm just saying that you have to learn eventually where to find the documentation. google has a linux-only search engine at http://www.google.com/linux that can probably help you, i use it all the time. hope that helps.

Do you have that mouse hooked up as a PS/2 device or is it USB? Do you know how the mouse is defined in XF86Config (possibly you don't know what XF86Config is)?

# **********************************************************************
# Core Pointer's InputDevice section
# **********************************************************************

Section "InputDevice"

# Identifier and driver

Identifier "Mouse1"
Driver "mouse"
Option "Protocol" "IMPS/2"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"

That's pretty much the only thing in XF86Config that's not commented out when dealing with the mouse.

Their also must be a line that reads

Option "Device" "/dev/something"

probably pointing to /dev/mouse if you have the mouse hooked up as a PS/2 device, athough since /dev/mouse is just a symbolic link, it still could be the device in your XF86Config even if you are using it as a USB device. If you really want the buttons to work the way you want them to, you may have to do some experimentation to find out what number buttons they appear as (in other words, are they 4 and 5 or 6 and 7?). You may also need to specifically set the number of buttons on your mouse to 7 (2 for the regular buttons, 1 for the wheel button, 2 for the wheel scroll, and 2 for the extra buttons). You also will probably have to map the buttons to what you want in XF86Config as FirebirdV0273 suggested.