# Making the mouse wheel  work

## Thomas H. Oliver

I have a trackball with five buttons plus a wheel.  Under KDE only two of the buttons work and the wheel does not, haven't tried it with GNOME.  Okay, I'll be straight with you, it's a (gasp!) MICROSOFT TRACK BALL!!!!  (I used to have a Logitech version of it but it's no longer sold, no doubt driven out of business by the big boy, and I'm addicted to this form of trackball.)  Can anyone tell me how to activate the wheel or even better where a Linux driver for this trackball can be found?

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## El_Presidente_Pufferfish

put

```
Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
```

under your input device in your XF86Config file

for the mouse wheel

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## Thomas H. Oliver

Okay, I tried the ZAxis mod to the X config file, but it didn't seem to have any effect.  Not in KEdit, anyway, or in Konqueror, or Mozilla.

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## hertog

Options "Protocol" "explorePS/2"

Options "ZAxismapping" "6 7"

and from within X

xmodmap -e "pointer = 1 2 3 6 7 4 5"

Mind tho.. I am doing this away from the machine, and doing it from the brain... Could be a type in there

Explanation: ExplorePS/2 is the protocol for mice with 5 buttons (+2 for scrolling up en down)

the xmodmap thingy is needed for remapping the lot to the right buttons (and no, ZAxisMapping "4 5" won't cut it)

Hertog

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## ashkar

there are multiple ways to do this so just in case hertog's config doesn't work, try this:

```

Option     "Protocol" "IMPS/2"

Option     "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"

Option     "Buttons" "5"

```

i personally never had to jerk around with xmodmap, but your mileage will vary.

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## Thomas H. Oliver

I tried ashkar's solution first.  The wheel was recognized but not the additional buttons, so then I tried hertog's.  XFree didn't recognize "explorePS/2" and it aborted, so I did a bit of research and changed the reference to "ExplorerPS/2".  The reference to xmodmap went into .xinitrc just before "startkde" and XFree was happy with this arrangement.  The result is that all of the buttons are now sensed (kde blinks when I press a button that it doesn't want to do anything with) but only the left-side Trackball buttons are processed (including the integrated wheel button), together with the ball and wheel.  When I try to configure the mouse in kde it sees only the three buttons so I have to do some more research.

Many thanks to you all for replying to my message.

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## rac

Moving from Installing to Hardware.

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