I had been using a traditional mouse with my laptop, but finding a surface to get the mouse to move is a real pain.
For a variety of reasons we won’t get into here 😉 , I inherited the wife’s Logitech Marblemouse trackball. Out of the box I think that the trackball is in all senses superior to a regular mouse for use with a laptop, expect two..
Wireless would be nice.. (probably out there) and I really miss my middle scroll button on the mouse.
It took me a little bit of googling but I found this page that should do the trick for 10.04.. Hmmm I suppose I should get unto the next LTS but I can’t bring myself to go to unity.. https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Releases. I’m probably going to be one of those 11 hour holdouts.
On a side note.. I was perfectly ok with leaving 8.04… the audio issues really left a bad task in my mouth.
Anyway back to business. I just need some middle mouse scroll emulation here. Look at. this
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Logitech_Marblemouse_USB what they call option #1 where pressing and holding the small left button will make the marble behave as a middle mouse button.  I think I’ll give that a go and see if that works for me..
Ok.. lets see.
jonas@jonas-laptop:~$ # first things first need to figure out where:
jonas@jonas-laptop:~$ locate xorg.conf.d | grep d$
/usr/lib/X11/xorg.conf.d
jonas@jonas-laptop:~$ #is now change to the directory
jonas@jonas-laptop:~$ cd /usr/lib/X11/xorg.conf.d
jonas@jonas-laptop:/usr/lib/X11/xorg.conf.d$ # now create this file.. Need the sudo cause we're working in a protected directory
jonas@jonas-laptop:/usr/lib/X11/xorg.conf.d$ # Paste the configuration you want for the ref link
jonas@jonas-laptop:/usr/lib/X11/xorg.conf.d$ sudo gedit 50-marblemouse.conf
jonas@jonas-laptop:/usr/lib/X11/xorg.conf.d$ # see if we got it
jonas@jonas-laptop:/usr/lib/X11/xorg.conf.d$ ls
05-evdev.conf 10-synaptics.conf 10-vmmouse.conf 10-wacom.conf 50-marblemouse.conf
jonas@jonas-laptop:/usr/lib/X11/xorg.conf.d$ cat 50-marblemouse.conf
Section "InputClass"
Identifier "Marble Mouse"
MatchProduct "Logitech USB Trackball"
MatchIsPointer "on"
MatchDevicePath "/dev/input/event*"
Driver "evdev"
Option "ButtonMapping" "1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9"
Option "EmulateWheel" "true"
Option "EmulateWheelButton" "8"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
Option "XAxisMapping" "6 7"
Option "Emulate3Buttons" "true"
EndSection
jonas@jonas-laptop:/usr/lib/X11/xorg.conf.d$
Well, just rebooted and fired up qt-creator which was really noticing the lack of middle scroll capability and it works…. Yeahhh… On a side note… What really makes this nice is not that I have side scroll as well. I thought at first I wouldn’t like that but at the moment it seems pretty cool..