5-button mouse: forward and back buttons don't work

[lalaland]

I'm using Ubuntu 7.04. By default, the back and forward buttons (4 and 5) on my Logitech LX7 are mapped to middle-click and right-click. I had to change my xorg.conf according to:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=1295974&postcount=13

Why does the xorg.conf file care about the number of buttons, anyway? Can't something like this be detected, automatically (hopefully without any configuration files)?

[Pascal De Vuyst (pascal-devuyst)]

This bug did not have a package associated with it, which is important for ensuring that it gets looked at by the proper developers. You can learn more about finding the right package at [WWW] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/FindRightPackage . I have classified this bug as a bug in xorg.

[lalaland (lalaland-deactivatedaccount)]

Thank you! Linux consists of so many packages that I never know what to choose. IMHO, this needs to be simplified, too.

[Pascal De Vuyst (pascal-devuyst)]

Setting Option "ButtonMapping" "1 2 3 6 7" does map the 4th physical button to event 6 and the 5th physical button to event 7.

The problem is that the above mapping only works in firefox, and not in e.g. Nautilus and other applications with a back and forward button.
Firefox assumes that event 6 = back and event 7 = forward.
By default xorg assumes that event 6 and 7 take care of vertical scroll (Default: "ButtonMapping" "1 2 3 8 9 10 ...").

So the problem is that each application can decide for itself what events 6 and higher mean. Only event 1 to 5 are defacto standard.

I believe applications should always use event 6 and 7 for vertical scroll. All the additional buttons (event 8 and higher) should be left to the user to define, since they can do whatever you want them to do by e.g. using imwheel which maps a mouse event to a keyboard key combination depending on the application.
In that case a good default imwheel configuration that maps event 8 to the back button and event 9 to the forward button for frequently used applications should be enough. Then simply installing the imwheel package should make the back / forward buttons work and users are able to reconfigure them is they want these buttons to do something else.
Therefore we should be able to switch off firefox's handling of event 6 and 7 and leave this to imwheel instead. Does anybody know if this is possible in firefox?

Marking xorg task as invalid, nothing needs to change here.
Adding firefox and imwheel task.

[lalaland (lalaland-deactivatedaccount)]

No matter what you do, please make this work out of the box without requiring any packages to be installed or preferences to be modified. If those buttons don't work then only a few experts will know that "imwheel" needs to be installed. Everyone else will assume "those buttons don't work under Linux, so Windows is better".

[Pelládi Gábor (pelladigabor)]

If apps should use 6 and 7 for vertical scroll, let them do so. I don't know any application that would scroll vertically now, e.g. Nautilus displays a right-click menu instead. Make buttons 8 and 9 standard back and forward buttons all across Ubuntu. My grandma doesn't want to install scary apps and run scary commands to configure something trivial. She wants to use her mouse, with the buttons on it working.

[Kyromaster (kyromaster)]

I also agree that those button should work out-of-the-box and also forward and backward buttons on the keyboard should as well, if available.