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Tilt Wheel Mouse

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.

This article Jürgen Kreileder is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

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