Lack of middle button emulation makes HP life hard

[Peter Hutterer]

On Wed, Dec 08, 2010 at 10:33:25PM -0800, Dan Nicholson wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 8, 2010 at 4:54 PM, Peter Hutterer <peter.hutterer at who-t.net> wrote:
> > On Wed, Dec 08, 2010 at 04:30:01PM -0800, Dan Nicholson wrote:
> >> On Wed, Dec 8, 2010 at 9:25 AM, Keith Packard <keithp at keithp.com> wrote:
> >> >
> >> > So, HP laptops come with a pointy-stick in the middle of the keyboard
> >> > and only two buttons. Not having middle-button emulation in this
> >> > environment is pretty harsh.
> >> >
> >> > I know it's not optimal to enable this by default, but I'm wondering
> >> > what can be done to not break these people's machines?
> >>
> >> Ship some .conf files in evdev?
> >>
> >> Section "InputClass"
> >>     Identifier "NeedsMiddleButtonEmulation"
> >>     MatchIsPointer "yes"
> >>     MatchProduct "Crappy HP Laptop|Ancient Mouse"
> >>     Option "Emulate3Buttons" "yes"
> >> EndSection
> >>
> >> You could do the same for wheel emulation and make my thinkpad work
> >> usefully out of the box. :)
> >
> > fwiw, I'm trying to get generic config script support into gnome, so we
> > don't have to ship a million xorg.conf.d snippets for various
> > configurations.
> > https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=635486
> 
> That looks like a useful addition, but it still requires someone to
> code up the custom configurations and deploy them. 

looks like the name advertised by the trackstick that sparked this thread is
"PS/2 Generic Mouse". I'm rather hesitant on shipping any quirks matching on
this name with the driver, short of one that jumps out of the laptop and
hits the necessary engineers with a cluebat.

Cheers,
  Peter

> The nice thing
> about about doing it here is:
> 
> 1. We can ship the quirks with the driver and not have to rely on any
> out of band mechanism
> 
> 2. It's entirely independent of the desktop stack in use
> 
> The mechanisms are independently helpful, though.