I love my Logitech Marble Mouse. So much in fact that I have several spares in case my current one dies. It’s always been a little niggly to get to work with Linux though. Every few releases something changes and the configuration I had stops working 🙁
Ubuntu 18.04 and Mint 19 are just such releases. It took me some time to discover that my old configuration (from Mint 17 via Mint 18) didn’t work because it used the “evdev” driver which appears to have been dropped in favour of “libinput”. Not only that, the change of driver means the configuration directives have changed too, so the commands for scroll wheel emulation and so on no longer worked.
After grubbing about for configuration details I finally came up with the following to make mouse work once again. I created this in /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/50-marblemouse.conf.
Section "InputClass" Identifier "Marble Mouse" MatchProduct "Logitech USB Trackball" MatchIsPointer "on" MatchDevicePath "/dev/input/event*" Driver "libinput" Option "ButtonMapping" "1 9 3 4 5 6 7 8 2" Option "ScrollButton" "8" Option "ScrollMethod" "button" Option "MiddleEmulation" "on" EndSection
This makes the large left and right mouse buttons work as “normal” left and right mouse buttons. The small left hand button works in combination with the ball to provide scrolling and the small right hand button pastes.
Now I wonder how long it is before it will be broken again?
Dear James,
thanks a lot for your posting!
After updating to Mint 19 Cinnamon a few days ago, my trackman marble forgot how to scroll.
Changing to “libinput”, according to your advice, made the change. Thank you for your investigations!
Now, scrolling with “8” (small left button) pressed works fine.
I hoped, changing “8” to “1 3” would let me reactivate my favorite adjustment of holding both big buttons pressed, but that didn’t work. Trying to change ButtonMapping to “1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9” didn’t help either.
Do you have an idea of how to solve my little problem?
Greetings and best wishes from Hannover, Germany!
Thomas
I’m not sure that what you want to do is possible with libinput (assuming I have understood what you want properly). The ScrollButton option only takes a single integer parameter according to the manual.