Iīve never had the forward and back buttons on my Microsoft Intellimouse Explorer working in Mozilla (Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox) in Linux Mandrake (9.0/9.1/10.0) until today.
Cross reference Microsoft Intellimouse Explorer under Linux with this page for the full details. In my case, this was specifically for Mozilla Firefox and Mandrake 10.
Check the XFree section. I only needed to add the Option "Buttons" "7" line.
Follow the Xmodmap section. Note you can check if it is set with xmodmap -pp. Mine was already set. The use of xev is mentioned. You may need to install the X11 Contribs RPM for this. Anyway, when you run xev you should see that the side buttons when pressed trigger button events 6 and 7.
Now for the hard bit, the imwheel section. I never got the .imwheelrc file to work as is suggested. I found that I had an /etc/X11/imwheelrc file with lots of goodies. It had a section saying Mozilla was excluded, so I replaced the excluded bit with the two lines mentioned.
When I started imwheel it was with the extra -f parameter, and without the quotes around the number: imwheel -k -f -b 67. After trying this and finding it ran I added it to my /etc/X11/xinit.d/imwheel file. I tried my .xinitrc file, but that didnīt seem to work at all.
Updated April 23: This may all now be moot with the fixing of Mozilla Bug 64485 - [Linux] Intellimouse Explorer Backwards and Forwards button support. This should mean that these extra buttons work with no configuration necessary.
Updated May 21: This fix is in Mozilla 1.8 Alpha 1. From the release notes: "Intellimouse Explorer Backwards and Forwards buttons are now supported on Linux". Mozilla Firefox 0.9 should be out in early June with this feature.
