As near as I can tell, some update or tweak in the way X works has invalidated the configuration of my mouse via hal. This is definitely getting tiring. I have had to work around it by putting this in my .xinitrc:

xinput set-int-prop '"Logitech USB Trackball"' 'Evdev Wheel Emulation Button' 8 8
xinput set-int-prop '"Logitech USB Trackball"' 'Evdev Wheel Emulation' 8 1

If it starts to work differently, I’ll update, again.

A recent update of the xerver-xorg package (1:7.4+1) changed the way X configures input devices – they are now handled by hal or evdev, and their sections of the xorg.conf are ignored.

I filed a bug report, and was informed that it’s not a bug. I disagree, in that if you break things in an upgrade, it is a bug.

Never-the-less, I had to figure out how to get my EmulateWheel behaviour back since the upgrade.

The evdev man page is nigh on useless, but this blog entry helped a lot.  It has lead to the following as my /etc/hal/fdi/policy/marble_mouse.fdi:

<match key="info.product" string="Logitech USB Trackball">
 <merge key="input.x11_options.EmulateWheel" type="string">true</merge>
 <merge key="input.x11_options.EmulateWheelButton" type="string">8</merge>
 <merge key="input.x11_options.ZAxsisMapping" type="string">4 5</merge>
</match>

I got the info.product part by looking at /dev/input/by-id/, and
guessing. I logged out, and restarted hal for good measure. One or the
other may not be necessary.

I am trying to install MATLAB on a headless Linux server at work, and it is ridiculously miserable. I can’t believe that this is the industry standard. It is no wonder that people are switching to Python, Octave and Maxima. Between free, gratis systems and expensive with horrible installation, there is little to recommend MATLAB.