[SOLVED] Will a Kensington Expert Mouse trackball work with Kubuntu?

[cdupree]

I foolishly bought without doing my research a Kensington trackball to help reduce the carpal-tunnel stress, and have now found that it doesn't work when I plug it in. Is there any way to make this device work, or do I have to send it back? It feels great on the hand and would be very nice to use from that standpoint, but it needs to be able to move the cursor...

[de_koraco]

Re: Will a Kensington Expert Mouse trackball work with Kubuntu?

Maybe check out one of these results?

[cdupree]

Re: Will a Kensington Expert Mouse trackball work with Kubuntu?

Dude, my bad! The very first choice on the google search you linked to was an Ubuntu Forums post (http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1170509) that contained the solution. All I had to do, in case anyone else is looking to solve this problem, was edit the relevant file in /usr/share/hal/fdi/policy/10osvendor, which in my case was named 10-usbcsr-mice.fdi. I made a copy of the original and created a new file with that name containing exactly the following text, stolen from the UF post. After creating that file I rebooted and presto, I'm good! I shoulda done more careful research from the beginning, but the K/Ubuntu community, embodied by de_koraco, saved my butt. Many thanks!

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<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?>
<deviceinfo version='0.2'>
 <device>
  <match key='info.capabilities' contains='input.mouse'>
   <merge key='input.x11_driver' type='string'>mouse</merge>
   <merge key="input.x11_options.Device" type="string">/dev/ttyS0</merge>
   <merge key="input.x11_options.Protocol" type="string">ThinkingMouse</merge>
   <merge key="input.x11_options.Emulate3Buttons" type="string">false</merge>
   <merge key="input.x11_options.CorePointer" type="string">On</merge>
   <merge key="input.x11_options.Buttons" type="string">4</merge>
   <merge key="input.x11_options.ButtonMapping" type="string">1 2 3 4</merge>
  </match>
 </device>
</deviceinfo>