How to get your Microsoft Intellimouse Explorer to work under Ubuntu 5.10
UPDATE: depreciated… much simpler method can be found here…
Since I use a microsoft intellimouse explorer mouse and there are no drivers for it in linux, obviously, i set out on a quest this morning to get it working correctly. The only buttons that did not work correctly were the forward and backward buttons on the side of the mouse which I used to use frequently in Windows. After a quick google, I found a guide that I had to make a few changes to in order to get it to work and I figured I should document it for future use by me and possibly others.
The first step is to edit your xorg.conf file located in /etc/X11/ . I replaced the original mouse section with the section below:
Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Configured Mouse"
Driver "mouse"
Option "CorePointer"
Option "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
Option "Protocol" "ExplorerPS/2"
Option "Buttons" "7"
#Option "Emulate3Buttons" "true"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "6 7"
Option "Resolution" "100"
EndSection
The next step is to install imwheel. I used synaptic package manager to install this by searching for imwheel.
After installing imwheel you need to edit the imwheelrc file located in /etc/X11/imwheel/ .
".*"
None, Up, Alt_L|Left
None, Down, Alt_L|Right
After setting up imwheel, I created a script to startup when X starts to enable the features of the mouse… I created a script called mouse and placed it in my home directory:
xmodmap -e "pointer = 1 2 3 6 7 4 5"
imwheel -k -b "67"
Using the Sessions prefence menu in System>Preferences>Sessions, I added the mouse script to the startup tab so that when X starts, the script is ran…
After that you are good to go… You should be able to use the back and forward buttons now in nautilus and in firefox, and any other browswer probably…
Here is a link to the original article that I used to get my mouse working.
–Jason
