Pass all mouse events to the guest -> fixed in SVN

[Alexander Kojevnikov]

Currently only left, middle and right mouse buttons are emulated by the VirtualBox, other buttons don't work at all. In particular, thumb buttons are very useful for going back and forward in the history when browsing, but clicking on thumb buttons does nothing.

There are quite a few threads in the forum requesting this feature, I thought I would create a ticket:

• ​http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=14729
• ​http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=14095
• ​http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=13146
• ​http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=13100
• ​http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=9582
• ​http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=9034
• ​http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=8183
• ​http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=7238
• ​http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=5451
• ​http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=3438
• ​http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=1406
• etc...

[Frank Mehnert]

The problem is that the emulated mouse does only provide a limited number of mouse buttons -- the hardware specification simply doesn't define more than three buttons.

However, using the guest additions it should be possible to pass more button events to the guest.

[Michael Thayer]

We now pass five buttons to the guest. We also pass the vertical "tilt" scroll wheel, but only Linux guests seem to recognise this. For the record, a physical XP installation also refused to recognise the tilt wheel of a Microsoft mouse connected to the PS/2 port.

[bqbauer]

This does not appear to work in OpenSolaris guests of an OpenSolaris host. The guest web browser doesn't respond to the mouse buttons like the host. OpenSolaris web browsers normally respond to these buttons as in any other OS. Tested with FireFox 3.5.5 from opensolaris.org and with the stock 3.1 beta that comes with 2009.06.

An XP guest of the same host does recognize these new buttons.

[Michael Thayer]

It may be that OpenSolaris recognises the extra buttons on a USB mouse but not on a PS/2 one, which is what we emulate. The code seems to be there (in OpenSolaris) as far as I can see though from a quick search in the sources. Perhaps explicitly specifying a number of buttons in xorg.conf in the guest will make a difference? Bear in mind that at least buttons 4 and 5 are the vertical scroll wheel, and possibly (?) 6 and 7 the horizontal one.