Configuring Ubuntu – Getting 5 button mouse to work

I run an Ubuntu guest on VMWare Player (host OS is Windows 7) at home. For the longest time, one big annoyance has been that I didn’t have my 5 button mouse (Microsoft Natural Wireless Laser Mouse 7000 – but this tip applies to any 5 button mouse) working properly. Specifically, the two buttons on the side that are used for back/forward and critical for browsing weren’t working. A simple search on the Internet turned up the nugget that I needed to specifically tell X that I have a 5 button mouse (you actually tell X that it is a 7 button mouse since wheel down/wheel up counts as buttons). In Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, I created /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/xorg.conf with the following information:

Section "InputDevice"
    Identifier "ImPS/2 Generic Wheel Mouse"
    Driver "mouse"
    Option "CorePointer"
    Option "Protocol" "ExplorerPS/2"
    Option "Emulate3Buttons" "false"
    Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
    Option "ButtonMapping" "1 2 3 6 7"
EndSection

After this, I restarted my X server but still no dice. It was almost as if the VM wasn’t even getting the button clicks for the side buttons. As it turns out, this is easy to verify – just fire up xev and press the button in question to see if it is even being registered by the X server. I found that it wasn’t being registered. My immediate suspicion was that there must be some VMWare Player setting either global or per VM that’s missing which would enable the side buttons. Searching the web (searching still remains too much of an art of being able to ask the right question – the term that worked for me on bing was “vmware intellimouse”) turned up this link. There’s a per VM setting that you need to add – simply edit the .vmx file for the VM in question and add these lines:

usb.generic.allowHID = "TRUE"
mouse.vusb.enable = "TRUE"

Restart the VM and there it was – All 5 buttons working in my Ubuntu VM. Once again, the Internet triumphs over the dark forces conspiring to deny ordinary humans an enjoyable experience on Linux. As an added bonus, the buttons automatically mapped to back/forward in both Chrome and Firefox!