Arch Linux

Haakon

Member

From: Bergen, Norway

Registered: 2004-05-09

Posts: 109

Mouse wheel not working in Xorg with USB mouse? Try this!

I'm just posting this so others may hit upon it when they search.

For ages, I've been unable to get my mousewheel working,with my USB mouse, although everything in xorg.conf has been just fine. I just found out I needed to load the module uhci-hcd to make it work. Yay!

This can be done manually with 'modprobe uhci-hcd', or include uhci-hcd in the MODULES list in /etc/rc.conf.

incinerator

Member

From: Edinburgh, Scotland

Registered: 2005-02-15

Posts: 80

Re: Mouse wheel not working in Xorg with USB mouse? Try this!

This is not entirely true. It depends on what kind of motherboard you use. There are two main interface drivers for USB1 in the linux kernel. One is OHCI, the other one is UHCI. Also, there is EHCI but that one is for USB2.

I have a motherboard with an nforce2 chipset, for that chipset you need the OCHI to get the USB1 ports working and EHCI to get the USB2 ports working. However, on my machine hotplug discovers that automatically. I did not need to manually load any modules.

To get the wheel of a USB mouse working it is normally essential to set the "Buttons" parameter correctly in your xorg.conf
According to xorg documentation, the mousedriver cannot determine automatically how many buttons a mouse has got in excess of 3. Also, adjusting ZAxisMapping may help. I have both options set appropriately in my xorg.conf and the wheel works nice without adding any modules to your modules.conf

From the symptoms you are describing I'd rather guess that xorg did not discover your mouse at all and therefore fell back to using the kernel-provided mouse interface which cannot discover the number of buttons.

When having problems related to X, it is always a good idea to have a look at /var/log/Xorg.0.log. That will give you a hint what X fails to do.
If you are not using a display manager to start X or you are multiple X sessions at once the number may be a different, though.

polarrr

Member

Registered: 2004-09-12

Posts: 110

Re: Mouse wheel not working in Xorg with USB mouse? Try this!

You have xorg.conf in /etc/X11/ right? If not, you have to make one, either through xorgconfig or hwd -xa.

And find a input section for mouse. Should look something like this:

# **********************************************************************
# Core Pointer's InputDevice section
# **********************************************************************

Section "InputDevice"

# Identifier and driver

    Identifier  "Mouse1"
    Driver      "mouse"
    Option "Protocol"    "ExplorerPS/2"
    Option "Device"      "/dev/input/mice"
    Option "ZAxis Mapping" "4 5"
# Mouse-speed setting for PS/2 mouse.

#    Option "Resolution"        "256"

# When using XQUEUE, comment out the above two lines, and uncomment
# the following line.

#    Option "Protocol"  "Xqueue"

# Baudrate and SampleRate are only for some Logitech mice. In
# almost every case these lines should be omitted.

#    Option "BaudRate"  "9600"
#    Option "SampleRate"        "150"

# Emulate3Buttons is an option for 2-button Microsoft mice
# Emulate3Timeout is the timeout in milliseconds (default is 50ms)

#    Option "Emulate3Buttons"
#    Option "Emulate3Timeout"    "50"

# ChordMiddle is an option for some 3-button Logitech mice

#    Option "ChordMiddle"

EndSection

You see the line

Option "ZAxis Mapping" "4 5"

Just chuck that in your mouse section if it's not there. "Normally" that should just take care of it. If not, post your xorg.config.