Logitech Marble Mouse and X.org

Date: 24 August 2006

I recently got a Logitech Marble Mouse at work. It’s a nice little trackball but it has a minor problem. There is no button 2. “What is button 2?” you might ask. Button 2 is the middle mouse button. On your average scroll mouse, this is the button that is triggered when you click the scroll wheel. “So?” you might then ask. So, the middle mouse button is used in X to paste stuff from the X clip board. It’s a handy little feature and one that I don’t want to give up. So, here’s what I did to make this trackball usable for me. Keep in mind, I use my trackball left-handed so all you poor righties will just have to adjust.

The Plan

The Marble Mouse comes with four buttons. There are two large ones and two smaller ones. The smaller one will, by default, act as a scroll wheel. That’s a nice feature but there are even better ways of handling this in X.org. (These docs will probably work with XFree86, too, but I haven’t tested them.) I wanted to use the small button on the right as my middle button. (Remember, I’m flying lefty.) The small button on the left, is going to trigger the scroll features.

.xmodmap

.xmodmap is used to by X.org to change your local keymappings. It can also change the mappings for your mouse buttons using the pointer command. Here’s what mine looks like:

pointer = 3 5 1 4 2 6 7

Let’s go through this together, shall we? First, you’ll notice that the numbers are out of order. The positions of the numbers correspond to the default button positions. If you don’t set pointer, the default would be the same as saying

pointer = 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

The buttons on the Marble Mouse are numbered this way by default:

.	Left	Right
Big	1	3
Small	4	5

The first thing I did was swap buttons 1 and 3. This reverses the main buttons. This is your standard swap for lefties. Next, I swapped button 5 for my non-existant button 2. This gives me the middle-click that I want. Everything else was left the same. You can enable your changes by running xmodmap ~/.xmodmap. I recommend adding that command to your .xsession file so that it’s run when you log into X.

X.org Configuration

Now, I didn’t really want to lose the scroll features, so I made some changes to xorg.conf so that I can get those back and, in fact, get a few more features. Before you start screwing with your X config, you want to do is create a backup of /etc/X11/xorg.conf so that you have a working config to go back to. Go ahead and do that. I’ll wait. … Okay, now that you’ve finished your backup, we can proceed. Here are the relevent sections of my xorg.conf.

Section "ServerLayout"
...
InputDevice    "MarbleMouse" "CorePointer"
...
EndSection
...
Section "InputDevice"
Identifier  "MarbleMouse"
Driver      "mouse"
        Option "CorePointer"
        Option "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
        Option "Protocol" "ExplorerPS/2"
        Option "Buttons" "7"
        Option "EmulateWheel" "1"
        Option "EmulateWheelButton" "4"
        Option "XAxisMapping" "6 7"
        Option "YAxisMapping" "4 2"
EndSection

In the ServerLayout section for your system, you need to add the Marble Mouse to your config to verify that it gets used. Then create a new InputDevice section for the MM. Many of these options are described in this post to the Ubuntu forums at http://www.ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-77005.html. The EmulateWheel switch tells X that we want to enable the wheel features when a button is pressed. EmulateWheelButton tells X that we want to use button 4 (the small, left button) for that. The important changes are to the YAxisMapping line. Normally, that is set to “4 5” but since we swapped those in .xmodmap we need to swap the buttons, we need to set that to “4 2”. Restart X for those changes to take effect.

Now, when you log back into X, you can hold down the small, left button and move the ball, your pages will scroll up and down and to the sides.