So I bought me an Apple Mighty Mouse for my Linux box. $45 (with the academic discount) is a lot of money for a mouse, but it seemed pretty cool. And it is pretty cool—except for the little matter that the horizontal scrolling doesn't work…
For those of you not familiar with the Mighty Mouse, it has this funny little mini-trackball on top useful for scrolling, and these really funny little side buttons (or pressure sensors or something) that you can squeeze to…I dunno.
After many hours of screwing with X and Linux, I'm convinced that my 2.6.15.6 kernel is just not generating any input events for horizontal scrolling. It looks like the USB HID input driver is responsible, and I might even see how to fix it. But I don't know that subsystem well enough to be sure my fix is the right thing, and somebody borrowed both my copies of Linux Device Drivers, as near as I can tell, so I went out and got another one for $30 (with a 30% Borders discount), but I don't really know when I'll have time to chase it more.
Meanwhile, I can return the mouse before May 9 with a 10% "restocking fee".
Other than the missing axis, the new mouse actually is pretty nice. It's just that I unplugged a pretty nice scrollwheel PS/2 mouse that had always worked fine to plug the Mighty one in.
Hardware is a pain. I still can't figure out how to get my cool pen-sensor device to work with Linux, and now Fry's is out of stock and so is everyone on the net except places selling it for $80 or more rather than the $50 I paid (which already seemed on the high end to me).
The good news is that once I figure out this USB HID and not-quite-HID and Linux input stuff, I'll be the master of space and time, or at least the master of hardware.
I just want my cool new mouse to plug in and work right, the way The Rest of Them would expect. (B)