HOWTO Enable Extra Mouse Buttons in Suse 9.2

MS Trackball ExplorerI have a MS Trackball Explorer Mouse and only the two primary buttons (left and right) and the scroll wheel work by default in Suse 9.2. The mouse has seven buttons in total: left, right, wheel-up, wheel-down, wheel-click, back, and forward. I could only find detailed extra mouse button HOWTOs for other flavours of Linux and had to improvise to get it to work under Suse 9.2.

First edit the XF86Config file:
vi /etc/X11/XF86Config

Modify the “InputDevice” “mouse” section of to look like the following:

Section "InputDevice"
Driver "mouse"
Identifier "Mouse[1]"
Option "ButtonNumber" "7"
Option "Buttons" "7"
Option "Device" "/dev/mouse"
Option "Name" "Microsoft Trackball Explorer"
Option "Protocol" "ExplorerPS/2"
Option "Vendor" "Sysp"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "6 7"
EndSection

Create a new config file in your home directory:
echo "pointer = 1 2 3 6 7 4 5" > /home/brad/.Xmodmap

Links:

My next step if installing the ATI Linux Driver which apparently is pretty shitty and a headache to install.