From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 Galeon/1.2.6 (X11; Linux i686; U;) Gecko/20020830 Description of problem: Most modern mice come configured with more than three accessible buttons. However, selection of a mouse during the initial installation or using the redhat-config-mouse applet sort of assumes that you only have 3 mouse buttons. The only thing it seems to determine is whether Z axis mapping should be inserted into the XFree86 configuration file. Mouse drivers for Windows allow manufacturers to assign different functions to other mouse buttons (common double-click). Such functionality should also exist in Red Hat Linux. XFree86 natively supports mice with more than three buttons. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. see description 2. 3. Actual Results: see description Expected Results: see description Additional info:
This is a pretty hard request to implement. In Windows, mice manufacturers write their own software, so they can tailor the software to use all the particular features of each mouse. Microsoft does not attempt to write all the mice drivers themselves as the work involved would be huge. Most mice manufacturers choose to not create such drivers for Linux. In my opinion, these features needs to come from the mice manufacturers, not Red Hat. X Windows does support mice with more than three buttons, but that doesn't help us during mouse configuration. As far as I know, there is no way to probe the mouse to detect how many buttons there are. We also don't have a lab full of every kind of mouse in existence. Don't get me wrong, I understand your point and I agree with it, but I just don't see a practical way that we could undertake such a project. The same problem exists with a lot of the keyboards these days which have all kinds of extra buttons to launch various applications. I would love to have those work as well as they do in Windows, but we have almost no cooperation from the hardware manufacturers in the consumer/peripheral market segment. Deferring this report.