HOWTO Evdev Input

From Gentoo Linux Wiki

There are many HOWTOs out there that give obsolete info on how to configure the use of Evdev in Xorg. Here is a simple way to use it to have all of your mouse buttons up and ready presto.

[edit] Configuring Evdev

Most of the information comes from this bug report: [1] and [2]

In short, the only way to configure evdev to indicate which device to use is through option "Device", not "Name" or "Phys".

Here's what I have in my xorg.conf:

 Section "InputDevice"
       Identifier      "Configured Mouse"
       Driver          "evdev"
       Option          "CorePointer"
       Option          "Device"        "/dev/input/event4"
 EndSection
 
 Section "InputDevice"
       Identifier      "Generic Keyboard"
       Option          "CoreKeyboard"
       Option          "Device"        "/dev/input/event3"
       Option          "XkbLayout"     "fr"
       Option          "evBits"        "+1"
       Option          "keyBits"       "~1-255 ~352-511"
       Option          "Pass"  "3"
       Driver          "evdev"
 EndSection

The only problem here is to find which device file to use, use:

 $ ls -lh /dev/input/by-id/
 total 0
 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 9 2008-03-07 16:36 usb-Logitech_USB_Receiver-event-kbd -> ../event3
 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 9 2008-03-07 16:36 usb-Logitech_USB_Receiver-event-mouse -> ../event4
 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 9 2008-03-07 16:36 usb-Logitech_USB_Receiver-mouse -> ../mouse1
 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 9 2008-03-07 18:36 usb-THRUSTMASTER_2_in_1_DT-event-joystick -> ../event7
 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 6 2008-03-07 18:36 usb-THRUSTMASTER_2_in_1_DT-joystick -> ../js0

With this simple setup, I have access to all buttons on my Logitech mouse.