Matt Van Stone

I am so happy right now. First tonight I got my mouse working in Ubuntu 6.10 without having to reseat the USB dongle every time I start up. Now I have all 8 buttons and both the vertical and horizontal scroll working.

It was pain staking, I’ll tell you that much. I got most of my information from ubuntuforums.org, but some of it was all me.

First off, my setup was a bit different than most users on the forum. I have the Logitech MX5000 Bluetooth Desktop which comes with an MX1000 mouse and an MX5000 keyboard. Most people on the forum just have the mouse. In the average user’s case only one device would go through the USB receiver making it easy for Linux to identify. In my case both the keyboard and mouse go through the same receiver, so specifying to evdev which device was the mouse got a little trickier.

If you are having a problem getting all of the buttons on your Logitech mouse working I would suggest you first read over this post at ubuntuforums.org. It is very informative and has helped many people.

Let me outline some of my specifics here. The following code snippits are what is currently working on my computer:

cat /proc/bus/input/devices

I: Bus=0003 Vendor=046d Product=c70e Version=4004
N: Name="Logitech Logitech BT Mini-Receiver"
P: Phys=usb-0000:00:02.1-9.1.4.2/input0
S: Sysfs=/class/input/input1
H: Handlers=kbd event1
B: EV=120003
B: KEY=10000 7 ff800000 7ff febeffdf ffefffff ffffffff fffffffe
B: LED=1f

I: Bus=0003 Vendor=046d Product=c70a Version=4004
N: Name="Logitech Logitech BT Mini-Receiver"
P: Phys=usb-0000:00:02.1-9.1.4.3/input0
S: Sysfs=/class/input/input2
H: Handlers=kbd mouse0 event2 ts0
B: EV=f
B: KEY=c0002 400 0 0 fff0001 f80 78000 6639fa d841d7ad 9e0000 0 0 0
B: REL=1c3
B: ABS=1 0

ls /dev/input

by-id  by-path  event0  event1  event2  mice  mouse0  ts0

Important bits of my xorg.conf

Section "ServerLayout"
    InputDevice    "MX1000"
    Identifier     "Default Layout"
    Screen         "Default Screen" 0 0
    InputDevice    "Generic Keyboard"
#   InputDevice    "Configured Mouse"
    Option         "AIGLX" "true"
EndSection
...
Section "InputDevice"
    Identifier     "MX1000"
    Driver         "evdev"
    Option         "CorePointer"
    Option "Device" "/dev/input/event2"
    Option         "Resolution" "800"
    Option "AbsoluteScreen" "0"
EndSection

Now I followed the steps in Section 1 of the forum post above, but every time I tried to start GDM after modifying xorg.conf to use evdev Xorg would crash and I would get the following error at the end of my /var/log/Xorg.0.log.old file:

(II) evdev brain: Rescanning devices (1).
(**) Option "CorePointer"
(**) MX1000-usb-0000:00:02.1-9.1.4.3/input0: Core Pointer
(II) MX1000-usb-0000:00:02.1-9.1.4.3/input0: Found 1 absolute axes.
(II) MX1000-usb-0000:00:02.1-9.1.4.3/input0: Configuring as pointer.
(**) MX1000-usb-0000:00:02.1-9.1.4.3/input0: Configuring in Absolute mode.
(**) MX1000-usb-0000:00:02.1-9.1.4.3/input0: AbsoluteScreen: -1.

Backtrace:
0: /usr/X11R6/bin/X(xf86SigHandler+0x81) [0x80c3971]
1: [0xffffe420]
2: /usr/lib/xorg/modules/input/evdev_drv.so [0xb713a67b]
3: /usr/lib/xorg/modules/input/evdev_drv.so [0xb713b6fd]
4: /usr/lib/xorg/modules/input/evdev_drv.so(evdevNewDriver+0x44) [0xb713b860]
5: /usr/lib/xorg/modules/input/evdev_drv.so [0xb713a3f1]
6: /usr/X11R6/bin/X(InitInput+0x16f) [0x809f21f]
7: /usr/X11R6/bin/X(main+0x355) [0x806e5e5]
8: /lib/tls/i686/cmov/libc.so.6(__libc_start_main+0xdc) [0xb7dab8cc]
9: /usr/X11R6/bin/X(FontFileCompleteXLFD+0xa1) [0x806da51]

Fatal server error:
Caught signal 11.  Server aborting

So I did a search on google for evdev AbsoluteScreen and added the following line to the InputDevice section for my mouse in xorg.conf:

Option "AbsoluteScreen" "0"

I had no faith in this working, but to my surprise it did. I had to double check to make sure that yes in fact it was working. I played with the buttons a bit and found that they were all functioning. Even the side button that before was acting the same as button 1 was working. I now have it set to enable Scale (Expose) in Beryl.

I’m not sure why this AbsoluteScreen option was causing issues on my computer. Maybe it had something to do with my dual-head video card or the way I have beryl setup. Maybe it has to do with me using beta nvidia drivers. I really dont know, but it worked for me.