Syntactic sugar

Trackman Marble FX Cordless

My all-time-favorite mouse trackball is the Logitech Trackman Marble FX (Cordless).  Logitech stopped making those a couple of years ago, but I’ve bought 5 of them and since the first one still works fine I’ll probably be using this model until USB is replaced with a new kind of port;)

The Trackman FX has 4 buttons and no dedicated scrollwheel. Before Ubuntu Jaunty (9.04) I was able to configure the buttons from /etc/X11/xorg.conf, but I upgraded from Ubuntu Hedgy (8.04) to Ubuntu Intrepid (8.10) all the way to Ubuntu Jaunty (9.04) and Ubuntu dropped the mouse-configuration from xorg.conf in favour of the HAL-device-manager.

My xorg.conf setup for the Trackman FX looked like this:

Section "InputDevice"
	Identifier "TFX"
	Driver "mouse"
	Option "CorePointer"
	Option "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
	Option "Name" "TrackMan Marble FX"
	Option "Vendor" "Logitech"
	Option "Protocol" "ExplorerPS/2"
	Option "Buttons" "9"
	Option "Emulate3Buttons" "true"
	Option "EmulateWheel" "1"
	Option "EmulateWheelButton" "8"
	Option "YAxisMapping" "4 5"
	Option "XAxisMapping"   "6 7"
EndSection

Using this configuration the upper-left button was assigned as scroll-switch; if I’d keep the button pressed and use the trackball I could scroll.  The left-middle button was used as “normal” left-mouse-button, and the lower-left button used as back-button for Firefox and Nautilus.
However; xorg.conf configuration didn’t work anymore in Jaunty; HAL took over, but how to configure the Trackman FX from HAL? After several searches in Google I came across this bugreport in Launchpad. According to the posts I’d had to create the file /etc/hal/fdi/policy/mouse-wheel.fdi and enter the following :

<deviceinfo version="0.2">
        <device>
                <match key="info.product" string="Logitech USB Receiver">
                        <merge key="input.x11_options.Buttons" type="string">9</merge>
                        <merge key="input.x11_options.EmulateWheel" type="string">true</merge>
                        <merge key="input.x11_options.EmulateWheelTimeout" type="string">300</merge>
                        
                        <merge key="input.x11_options.EmulateWheelButton" type="string">8</merge>
                        <merge key="input.x11_options.XAxisMapping" type="string">6 7</merge>
                        <merge key="input.x11_options.YAxisMapping" type="string">4 5</merge>
                        
                        <merge key="input.x11_options.Emulate3Buttons" type="string">true</merge>
                </match>
        </device>
</deviceinfo>

After a reboot (which isn’t neccesary; unplugging it and plug it in again is enough) the Trackman didn’t do what I wanted it to do.  After some digging I suddenly realized the Trackman I used was cordless, and the model in mouse-wheel.fdi was defined as Logitech USB Trackball, the wired model.  It seemed HAL didn’t match the info.product-string with the cordless Trackman, so I needed to find out what would match my Trackman.  This was quite easy; from a terminal type:

sudo hal-device|less

You’ll get a list of all devices in HAL,  press slash (/) and enter Logitech to search for any device from Logitech and you’ll run into “info.product = ‘Logitech USB Receiver’  (string)”. The Cordless Trackman FX apparently had the product-id : “Logitech USB Receiver”, so I changed the line match key=”info.product” in  mouse-wheel.fdi to this product-id. Unplugged the Trackman, plugged it in again and hurray!!! Scrolling worked!

If you have a Trackman Marble FX Cordless, all you have to do is create /etc/hal/fdi/policy/mouse-wheel.fdi and enter/copy-paste:

<deviceinfo version="0.2">
        <device>
                <match key="info.product" string="Logitech USB Receiver">
                        <merge key="input.x11_options.Buttons" type="string">9</merge>
                        <merge key="input.x11_options.EmulateWheel" type="string">true</merge>
                        <merge key="input.x11_options.EmulateWheelTimeout" type="string">300</merge>
                        <merge key="input.x11_options.ButtonMapping" type="string">1 8 3 4 5 6 7 2 9</merge>
                        <merge key="input.x11_options.EmulateWheelButton" type="string">8</merge>
                        <merge key="input.x11_options.XAxisMapping" type="string">6 7</merge>
                        <merge key="input.x11_options.YAxisMapping" type="string">4 5</merge>
                        
                        <merge key="input.x11_options.Emulate3Buttons" type="string">true</merge>
                </match>
        </device>
</deviceinfo>

Unplug the Trackman (or the Receiver), plug it in again and you should be ready!

Small update:
The outer left button didn’t act as third-mouse-button, as I was used to. Using the method above it will be used as back-button. If you’d like it to be used as third-mouse-button, remove the line :

<merge key="input.x11_options.ButtonMapping" type="string">1 8 3 4 5 6 7 2 9</merge>

buTTon linux, ubuntu Cordless, HAL, Jaunty, Marble, mouse, Trackman Marble FX, ubuntu, Ubuntu 9.04, xorg.conf