Tuesday, November 09, 2004

Wheel mouse in Slackware Current

This morning I brought in my old Logitech FirstMouse+ from home and connected it to Slacktop. As expected, Slack recognized the PS/2 mouse and I was able to use its basic functions upon logging into X. However, the mouse wheel didn't work; Slackware still requires you to manually tweak the system's config to get the wheel running.

Doing so is quite simple, though. Become root and open in /etc/X11/xorg.conf in your preferred editor. Then find the section labeled "Core Pointer" and make it look like this:

Section "InputDevice"

# Identifier and driver

Identifier "Mouse1"
Driver "mouse"
Option "Buttons" "5"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
Option "Protocol" "IMPS/2"
Option "Device" "/dev/mouse"
I had to had the last four lines above. The reason the option for "Buttons" is 5 is that the wheel is seen as 3 buttons -- one for each way it rotates and one for when you press it as a button.

If you have X already running you'll need to exit and restart the X server for the change to take effect.

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