Now that I finally got the kernel’s evdev driver running on my machine, I managed to get my tilt-wheel mouse working.

• Mouse section from /etc/X11/XF86Config-4:

  Section "InputDevice"
    Identifier "Configured Mouse"
    Driver     "mouse"
    Option     "CorePointer"
    Option     "Protocol"        "evdev"
    Option     "Dev Name"        "*Microsoft IntelliMouse*"
    Option     "Buttons"         "9"
    Option     "ZAxisMapping"    "8 9 6 7"
    Option     "Emulate3Buttons" "false"
  EndSection

• To get the buttons in the correct order for X11, change /etc/X11/Xmodmap to:

  pointer = 1 2 3 8 9 7 6 4 5

  Now horizontal scrolling should work with GNOME!

• In Mozilla-based browsers however, tilting the wheel moves back- or forward in the history now. To fix this open about:config and set mousewheel.horizscroll.withnokey.action to 0.
  Unfortunately Mozilla and GNOME seem to have different interpretations of left and right; set mousewheel.horizscroll.withnokey.sysnumlines to true to fix that.
• To get the sides buttons going back- and forward in history again, install xbindkeys and xvkbd. Bind the buttons to Alt-Left and Alt-Right in ~/.xbindkeysrc:

  "xvkbd -text "\[Alt_L]\[Left]""
    m:0x10 + b:8
  "xvkbd -text "\[Alt_L]\[Right]""
    m:0x10 + b:9

  and run xbindkeys in ~/.gnomerc

January 15th, 2006: Xorg 6.9 and later come with a different evdev driver. I’ve made a new guide now. The new guide talks about the Logitech MX1000 but it’s quite easy to adapt the configuartion for other mice.