Fixing Mouse Mapping in Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex

So far Intrepid is behaving wonderfully both in my desktop PC and my laptop. However, there are minor annoyances similar to all the previous versions. One issue that really bothered me was not being able to re-map the buttons on my mouse. If you have a 2 or 3 button mouse, that may not be a big problem for you. Intrepid handles your mouse as good as you may want. However, I am using an Intellimouse Explorer 2.0, which has 2 side buttons on the left. Moreover, the scroll wheel can be tilted left and right to do horizontal scrolling. What really bugs me with this mouse is that the middle mouse click is normally assigned to the wheel. In other words you must click the wheel for a middle mouse click. Well, this is what many other companies do. But, Microsoft decided to make the wheel as unclickable as possible. You really need to exert some force on the wheel to be able to click. But this unreasonable force usually results in the mouse cursor moving somewhere else before I can realize the click. Long story short, I normally assign one of the side buttons as the middle mouse click, which is way more easier to click when compared to the wheel. In versions before Intrepid, you can easily do this by altering the xorg.conf file. However, starting with Intrepid, the input devices are handled by the HAL and not XOrg. This means, your xorg.conf tricks are not worth a buck anymore. Fortunately, a not so-popular but easy to apply solution exists. All you have to do is to create a file named .xmodmap in your home directory. Now, open this file with gedit:

gedit .xmodmap

and type the following into your file:

pointer = 1 8 3 4 5 6 7 2 9

Then, save, exit and restart. As you can guess easily, this makes button 2 behave like button 8, and button 8 behave like button 2. Button 2 is my wheel click and button 8 is my first left side button. So, after this change the left side button click corresponds to a middle click. Bingo!