Talk:Linux and the mouse

I'm confused by the articles statement that its about "how to enable the Horizontal Scroll in Firefox under most Linux distributions including Mandriva Linux 2006 PowerPack+". It appears to only cover Mandriva. Its great to see information moved from a forum thread to a KB article but it needs re-organizing in order to let other users (who use different platforms/software) contribute information. It should de-emphasize whether the answer came from testing or info from the net - right now it looks too much like a log of one persons test efforts (with their mice and their favorite distro).

One example of the type of information that seems missing would be this Ubuntu bug report about how to use about:config to solve Firefox specific horizontal scrolling problems with synaptic touchpads. note: It seems to assume the person already followed the instructions in this article to enable horizontal scrolling of synaptic touchpads by editing xorg.conf. Tanstaafl 15:47, 6 January 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for your input. I took the liberty of adding your requested h3 element so that you know where to put in Ubuntu specific information in this fully structured article. Please contribute your findings soon about Ubuntu, so it doesn't confuse anyone who is searching for this information. Other distribution contributors may also add h3 elements and any annotations elsewhere in the article that are specific to their distribution, like I have outlined already with the Notes section per item.

The article you referenced above only covers XWindows configuration and is incomplete as far as system configuration... This is where this article is more complete than most. Martimus8

Just a side note too... this article will never be fully "complete" because as we all know, hardware and software does change... and this article will continually change as well. The basic principle of mice support is already in place and the statistics on the mass number of hits this article (and the original) gets prove that someone is finding the information useful. I have used Mandriva because they do appear to visit here and have the best mouse support I've seen to date. If you wish to contribute other platforms and where the package is for the udev/evdev drivers are located in a particular version, feel free to include your findings so your distributions may be heard. I have included SeaMonkey support as well because I know that there are a lot of Mozilla Suite users out there that still use that as well.

Windows typically uses a proprietary driver per mouse, whereas Linux strives to reuse existing code. udev and evdev are the equivalent of "PlugNPlay", but if the hardware is unknown to other developers (e.g. their values, what it is and what it supports) mice will be limited to the typical 3 primary buttons and only the vertical scroll. My goal for the last 2 years has been to improve peoples understanding of how to get at this information so that they can successfully implement not only the horizontal scroll, but they can also implement the missing buttons in Mozilla based products.

The article mentioned there is also seems to be a whee bit out of date, but it is still important information for specific proprietary drivers. The aim of this article is PnP via a single driver that is found on Mandriva and I have also found it K/Ubuntu and Debian as well. I rarely destroy my system just to try out another distribution... so please, if you have something to contribute by all means add it to the document because I won't be trying Debian or K/Ubuntu for a while as I'm quite content with Mandriva's efforts to support alternate mice besides the Explorer PS/2 mouse driver.

P.S. Everyone please re-read the summary... it is the "charter" for the document, including all Platforms and all Mozilla products (Need some Songbird and other derivatives too). The example I picked for the initial test mouse was picked up by Mandriva and it works "out of the box" as the saying goes... Do you want your mouse to work out of the box too?
Martimus8

If there is no additional interest in other platforms or other browser derivatives other than SeaMonkey and Firefox browsers, I might be removing the currently unused header elements suggested by Tanstaafl in a few months.
Martimus8

I'll try to neutralize this article more as soon as I can... but it's pretty neutral with notes on specifics regarding Mandriva/Mandrake because that's what I run. I have a few more ideas on how to rearrange things but will need some time to ponder.
Martimus8 08:59, 11 January 2008 (UTC)

Meant to say browsers in comment for last change Martimus8 09:38, 11 January 2008 (UTC)