After the fuffing and fawing required to get the Wacom tablet up to speed, swapping the buttons on the Kensington trackball required just one stanza in /etc/X11/xorg.conf.
To wit:
Section "InputClass" Identifier "Kensington Trackball" MatchProduct "Kensington Expert Mouse" Option "SendCoreEvents" "True" Option "ButtonMapping" "3 8 1 4 5 6 7 2" EndSection
For some no-doubt logical reason, it Just Works without an InputDevice stanza or anything in ServerLayout.
That will swap the buttons on any matching trackball, should I be so bold as to plug more than one in at a time …
The old FDI file is there.
Alright, this worked as advertised on Debian Squeeze (which is HAL-less). Definitely simpler than my old FDI file.
Whew!
All along I’d thought the whole point of this computerization thing was to make stuff easier for us. XML may be easier for our robotic overlords, but I’m not seeing the point for config files like this…
Time for me to correct the error of my thinking, I suppose.
In all fairness, most of it is just comments from my ’08 self for my future self.
But yeah, plain text configuration is much more user-friendly. (okay, technically XML is plain text also…)
Obligatory XKCD reference
The comic is thought-provoking, but the flyover text rocked me back on my heels…
What comments would I leave for my ’08 self now?
Correction, the comments were left by my ’09 self, and were also potentially for others who might’ve come across it through a search or some such. Anyway, I have an idea for a message that I would send to my ’08 self, but the mid-June ’09 self was already in the middle of it so it was too late to make a slightly different choice a few months earlier. Ultimately it didn’t matter too much, but it was still a stupid choice. Then again, otherwise I might’ve made a similar mistake at a later point in time.
So never mind more life-related choices and I’d just tell myself to ignore the FDI files and just go for xorg.conf. That’s about it. :P
I’ve decided that if I knew then what I know now, I’d get in much more complex trouble… so it’s best to go though life once, cold, without any hints.
Haha, that is quite possible.