Help File Library: Configuring the Intellimouse Explorer in XFree86

[ The original version of this document may be found at http://www.deadman.org/X/xbuttons.html. Thanks to Sam for contributing this to our Help Files! ]

After many many hours of restarting X, we've found that, in order to get all seven of the buttons to be visible to X, you need to define the mouse as follows:

Section "InputDevice"
	Identifier "Mouse0"
	Driver "mouse"
	Option "Protocol" "ExplorerPS/2"
	Option "Device" "/dev/mouse"
	Option "Buttons" "7"
	Option "ZAxisMapping" "6 7"
EndSection

That block goes in XF86Config which might be in /etc/X11 or /etc and might also be called XF86Config-4.

Please note that this is for XFree86 Version 4, not 3.3.x!!!

If left as-is, your scrolling will occur with the "side buttons" and NOT with the wheel, so one has to
xmodmap -e "pointer = 1 2 3 6 7 4 5"
to get the wheel working correctly. I have this in a shell script that GNOME executes on startup. If anyone knows any other way to make this permanent, please email me. I've tried ~/.Xdefaults ~/.xdefaults ~/.xinitrc ~/.xsession and a couple of things in /etc/X11/ and none of them work.

If you set ZAxisMapping to "4 5" the mousewheel will work, but X won't see the other buttons. (xev)

I've posted a screenshot of xev showing the 6 and 7 mouse events.

Once you have this configured, you may wish to head over to Colas Nahaboo X mouse wheel scroll page. He has a lot of good information on how to get various applications working with the mouse-wheel.

Send comments to Sam Rowe, deadman at deadman dot org.