Didier's Blog

I had some problems to have my 7 buttons mouse (Logitech MX510) working correctly under Linux.
Problem was that the Back and Forward buttons didn't work correctly:
the first had the same effect has the left button click and the second the same effect as the right button click.
And I couldn't find the right mouse (or equivalent) in the Mouse Configuration.

I could finally configure it correctly by editing the /etc/X11/XF86Config (Red Hat 4) and /etc/X11/xorg.conf (Oracle Unbreakable Linux) as the following:

(...)
Section "ServerLayout"
        (...)
        InputDevice    "Logitech" "CorePointer"
        (...)
EndSection
(...)
Section "InputDevice"
        Identifier  "Logitech"
        Driver       "mouse"
        Option      "Protocol" "ExplorerPS/2"
        Option      "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
        Option      "Buttons" "7"
        Option      "ZAxisMapping" "6 7"
        Option      "Emulate3Buttons" "no"
EndSection
(...)

The button numbers after "ZAxisMapping" are the values of the
scroll wheel up and down.

I used the xev tool to determine
which button numbers these are.
That is, I ran xev in a terminal,
hovered the mouse over the pop up window and on the mouse pushed the scroll
wheel up and down;
the output was as the following:

(...)
ButtonRelease event, serial 25, synthetic NO, window 0x2a00001,
    root 0x3b, subw 0x2a00002, time 550529, (22,49), root:(892,69),
    state 0x800, button 4, same_screen YES
(...)
ButtonPress event, serial 25, synthetic NO, window 0x2a00001,
    root 0x3b, subw 0x2a00002, time 551169, (22,49), root:(892,69),
    state 0x0, button 5, same_screen YES
(...)

I did the same to determine the values of the Back and Forward buttons:

(...)
ButtonRelease event, serial 25, synthetic NO, window 0x2a00001,
    root 0x3b, subw 0x2a00002, time 615813, (40,29), root:(910,49),
    state 0x200, button 6, same_screen YES
(...)
ButtonPress event, serial 25, synthetic NO, window 0x2a00001,
    root 0x3b, subw 0x2a00002, time 617300, (44,31), root:(914,51),
    state 0x0, button 7, same_screen YES
(...)

I then specified the order of the buttons (left, middle and right clicks, back, forward, wheel up & wheel down) in file /etc/X11/Xmodmap:

pointer = 1 2 3 6 7 4 5

It now works as expected :-)