So, I picked up a spare desktop recently at work, and I have finally wound down enough of current development/deadlilne stuff to play with it. I decided to install FreeBSD on this machine, to serve as my sandbox for playing with hot new Open Source softwares (like Wikis, social bookmarking apps, etc.). My sub-goal, however, is to play with FreeBSD. My personal webserver in my apartment has been running FreeBSD 4.x for years, but I have kindof "lost track" of current developments in FreeBSD.
To that end, I installed FreeBSD 6.0 beta 4 (which I had on CD), and used cvsup and "make world" to upgrade to the just-released FreeBSD 6.0 RC1. So far, things have been quite smooth. FreeBSD detected all of the hardware, and for being not-yet-finished, things seem as stable and polished as ever.
Due to the fact that Ubuntu Breezy came out the other day, I configured X and Firefox on the FreeBSD machine, so that I could use it today while my main Ubuntu desktop was upgrading itself. The only problem that I had was convincing my Logitech USB trackball to make the "scroll" button emit a "middle click" in FreeBSD. This works like a charm on Ubuntu, but with FreeBSD, I had to do some hacking. I tracked the mouse management stuff to a daemon called "moused(8)". It seems like the problem that I had was that by default, my mouse was emitting button 4, but I wanted it to emit button 2 (middle mouse button). So, I found the -m option in the man page, which looked like it would do what I wanted:
-m N=M Assign the physical button M to the logical button N. You may
specify as many instances of this option as you like. More than
one physical button may be assigned to a logical button at the
same time. In this case the logical button will be down, if
either of the assigned physical buttons is held down. Do not put
space around `='.
Unfortunately, the first 20 or so times that I tried this option, I couldn't get it to work right. The mouse buttons either didn't behave properly, or my button 4 didn't emulate the middle mouse button. Finally, after much struggling, I re-read that passage very carefully. The option is N=M, but the text immediately following that talks about assigning M to N. Confusing!
But, I made the proper adjustments, and now all is well. I used FreeBSD running xfce4 all day today, and pleasantly enjoyed the experience. We'll see what Ubunty Breezy holds in store for me on Monday.
-Andy.
Posted by andyr at October 15, 2005 02:55 AM