Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 140963
Logitech MX 1000 mouse: xorg does not see all 12 buttons
Last modified: 2007-11-30 17:10:55 EST
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041111 Firefox/1.0 Description of problem: I plugged in Logitech MX 1000 mouse. Xorg server does not distinguish some of its buttons. xev shows button numbers up to 5 - the side buttons do not work. There is a discussion here: http://www.linux-gamers.net/modules/wfsection/print.php?articleid=46. I tried the approach described there (writing 12 buttons and other options into xorg.conf) - but found that protocol "evdev" is not supported. xorg server would need ability to work with "evdev" Protocol directly (there are some patches mentioned on that page). Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): xorg-x11-6.8.1-12.FC3.1 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Plug in Logitech MX 1000 mouse (USB port) 2. Configure xorg.conf to use 12 buttons 3. xmodmap -e "pointer = 1 2 3 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 4 5" Actual Results: xmodmap says it only sees 7 buttons, so cannot map 12 of them Expected Results: swapping buttons 11/12 and 4/5
X11 does not support 12 buttons at all. It supports up to 7 buttons maximum, and scroll wheels and similar devices generally count and work like 2 individual buttons. As such, this is not a bug, but a hard coded limitation in the X server, and possibly in the protocol itself. If you have a device which has 7 or less buttons, including the scroll wheels and similar gizmos, and some or all of the extra buttons do not work, you may be able to get them to work by editing various config file options documented in the appropriate manpages. Other devices however may simply not have driver support for the special buttons on some pointing devices. That is also not a bug, but rather lack of a feature, either in the X.Org mouse driver, or the kernel input drivers, or both. In any case, with the current X server framework, it is only possible to have a maximum of 7 buttons. The proper place for these limitations to be overcome in the future, is in upstream enhancements to the X.Org drivers, the server, the X11 protocol, and the Linux kernel. You can file a bug report as a feature enhancement request in the X.Org bugzilla at: http://bugs.freedesktop.org in the xorg component in order to track this if you like. Someone may be able to enhance the X mouse driver to handle some of the extra buttons on some pointing devices out there, however a proper long term solution that works with all buttons on all devices will require some much larger future upstream X server and driver development, which is outside the scope of what we track in our bugzilla. I also recommend discussing this on the xorg@freedesktop.org mailing list if you're interested in the developmental aspects of solving the bigger problem described above. I'm closing this as "NOTABUG" as it is an X server/protocol limitation, as well as potentially lack of hardware support in the kernel and/or X drivers, and not a bug.
Created a but against xorg: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1947 Also, I am a bit surprised why the page I mentioned describes some operations with 12-button mouse as real. Do they cheat, I wonder?...
Seems like this is fixed in latest xorg, someone can confirm?
Well at least latest rpm for fc3 (xorg-x11-6.8.2-1.FC3.13) - still breaks at xmodmap with the same error.
X11R7 will be the first X.Org X11 release to support more than 7 buttons on devices of this nature by using the "evdev" input driver. Fedora Core 5 will probably be the first OS release to come with the "evdev" driver.