It's the little things

Ever notice how the little things either make or break a situation? Well, the "little thing" of forgetting all my linux passwords really put me in a crumby mood. (Until it got all fixed! Yay!)

But on the flip side, figuring out how to make my scroll mouse actually SCROLL was a little thing that has made Linux more appealing to use again. I absolutely hated not being able to scroll while surfing the web. That makes it pretty annoying and makes me less likely to use Slackware everyday, which was the whole idea when I started on this journey.

Well, today, one of my original "I gotta figure this out" issues was conquered! HURRAH! Here's how I did it.

First, I got some inspiration from HOWTO_Advanced_Mouse @ gentoo-wiki.com. I started by commenting out all the mouse related code in my /etc/X11/xorg.conf file. For example, for all of the current settings, I stuck # it WAS: in front of the line, so I knew what to revert back to if things went bad. (Another good idea is to make a copy of the original file before you mess with it. I had already done this from a previous attempt at making scrolling work.)

Next, I tried what the site suggested as my "edited configuration". This actually caused all kinds of problems for me, but nothing was insurmountable. I discovered that for my setup, I had to do the following:

...
Identifier "Mouse1"
Driver "mouse"
Option "Protocol" "ExplorerPS/2"
Option "Device" "/dev/mouse"
Option "Buttons" "5"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
...

If you are comparing to the example given on the link, it might be helpful to understand that the mouse I have really is a 5-button mouse. (Left and right buttons, scroll up, scroll down, and pressing the scroller down as a button.) Having it marked as 7 just made everything all confused. So because there are only 5, the ZAxisMapping option had to be set to "4 5" to jive with that. But, how did I figure that much out???

Well, first, let's take a step back for a moment. The scrolling stuff actually did get recognised by the 7 button configuration on the other site. How do I know this? Because I used the xev program (X-event tester) to find out that it did. A very nifty tool indeed! :)

BUT, next I went into Firefox in hopes of scrolling up and down on web pages all over the place. I quickly learned that trying to scroll with the mouse actually behaved like the "Back" and "Forward" buttons. Since my habit is to go up and down on a page, this was EXTREMELY annoying as my scrolling habits caused me to go to already visited pages. Oh, it was horrible. Trust me.

Then I met another useful link, addressing the specific scrolling issue in Firefox @ linuxquestions.org and learned that if I changed the ZAxisMapping to "4 5", all would be well after starting X up again. And amazingly, it was. :) I ran xev to make sure it still recognised everything. Then I bravely returned to Firefox. And the rest is (happy) scrolling history.

One more "little thing"....

I also figured out how to change the keyboard sensitivity in X so that I can hold down a key and it will actually repeat now. Very handy for those times you really need the Backspace key, or REALLY want to type hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

In case anybody is searching for this answer, look for your settings or preferences menu in your particular window manager. I'm currently using Freerock GNOME. I went to Desktop --> Preferences --> Keyboard. Once there, select "Key presses repeat when key is held down" and set the speed and delay properties to your tastes. Me? I like high speed and a touch of delay. Don't tell the cops! ;)

Interesting discoveries

Maybe that would be better represented as "Inadvertant discoveries" but anyway...

I was simply trying to check off one of my goals tonight. I did some googling about to find what might be workable and I learned that, once I take the time to do it, my scanner should work no problem, and also that my printer works better than I thought. (Some of the problems I had were my not paying attention to configuration details; for example having the default page size as A4 instead of Letter... no wonder things were going off the page. Duh!)

Then I thought I'd look for making my scroll wheel mouse working properly. This sounded like it might be "simple" and scrolling is something I miss desperately. So I stumbled onto a very interesting site. It's not quite a newbie site, but it has some great tips and ideas for configuring Slackware. Here's the link: How To Properly Set Up Slackware Linux. I'll be referring to it again soon, I'm sure.

Anyway, I found some simple instructions on how to get my mouse to scroll again (which I cannot confirm yet, since I haven't logged in -- or rebooted -- with the new settings in place) but then I wandered off into the guy's thoughts on window managers and his recommend of Gnome (which I noticed yesterday didn't come with Slackware :( I always used to like switching back and forth depending on what games I wanted to play! ;)) which lead me to "Freerock GNOME" which I had never heard of before. Since there sound like a number of advantages to having Freerock specifically, and I also was planning to download GNOME anyway, I thought I'd go ahead with the download.

The site offered a "simple", one-click install ... well not really one-click, but one-step. I typed in a single line on the command line and let it do this "simple" install do it's magic. (Especially since I had a failed Wine installation earlier on today ... I'll have to try downloading and installing the Windows emulating software from another interesting site: LinuxPackages.net

WELL...
I didn't read closely enough, but somehow I get away with that fact this time.

Turns out that this magic all-in-one installing thing is really just that... not only is it downloading and installing Freerock GNOME, it's also downloading and installing EVERY out of date Slackware dependency. I believe this is because of some magical, wonderful thing called slapt-get which appears to enjoy maintaining Slackware installs. Methinks that Mr. Slapt-Get and I might just become close friends.

Meanwhile, this entire updating process is taking a LONG time. I had NO idea what I was getting myself into! But it's still happening much quicker than me manually doing it all, etc. Right now it's downloading more stuff specifically for installing Freerock.

Elsewhere, I read today that Slackware 11.0 is being released soon. That's just like me going to all this trouble when a whole new version is on the way. I'll probably stick with 10.2 for a little while, unless I learn that 11.0 has something amazing that I simply cannot live without.

Well, I'm trying to read about XML while I'm waiting for this thing to finish up, so I can find out if my mouse works and if GNOME was installed, etc. So I take my leave for now.