Disable mouse buttons

[Chris Tyler]

On Mon, 2008-11-24 at 08:04 -0600, Bradley wrote:
> Chris Tyler wrote:
> > On Fri, 2008-11-21 at 10:32 -0600, Bradley wrote:
> >   
> >> Hello, here is a question I'm sure rarely, if ever gets, asked.
> >>
> >> How do I disable some of my mouse's buttons for a specific user?  I have 
> >> a 4 button mouse plus a scroll wheel (which also acts as another button) 
> >> and for one user want to disable all (including the scroll wheel) but 
> >> the left and right buttons.  I am using FC8 with GNOME.
> >>
> >> Reason?  We are trying to teach our son how to use a computer but a lot 
> >> of the software doesn't distinguish between the left mouse button and 
> >> some of the others and we want to make it so that if he presses one of 
> >> the extra buttons nothing will happen.  Any ideas or suggestions?
> >>
> >> This change MUST NOT affect the other user accounts and must be 
> >> localized to the one user.  Your help is appreciated.
> >>
> >> Bradley
> >>     
> >
> > Try:
> > xmodmap -e "pointer = 1 15 3 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 2"
> >
> > This will map buttons other than 1 and 3 to high button numbers, which
> > most applications will ignore. (Note that buttons 4 and 5 are typically
> > the scroll wheel). You can put it in the ~/.bash_profile
> >
> > -Chris
> >
> >   
> 
> Unfortunately, my Xserver is not run through a BASH shell and so 
> anything I put in the .bash_profile will be ignored.  Thanks anyway.
> 
> Bradley


Bradley,

That's the command that you need; you can test it by typing it manually
into his session.

I'm not clear on what you mean when you say the Xserver is not run
through a BASH shell; if you mean that you're logging in via GDM or
another display manager (which is the normal graphical login mechanism
on Fedora), the ~/.bash_profile does get executed as part of session
setup, and that command will take effect on the running X server after
user login. However, if you've changed your son's account to use another
shell (such as tcsh), you can simply place that command in the
corresponding startup script.

-Chris