Saturday, January 10, 2009

Solaris X11 emulate 3 button mouse

Happy 2009!
I've almost got the OSGi+Guice based bootstrap of  my code running in a glassfish server - testing now to work through a few last issues.  I'm pretty happy with this setup - Guice injects dependencies, and OSGi manages module startup and shutdown.  We'll see how it works out over time.
The Glassfish J2EE server runs on an Open Solaris install which a VirtualBox virtual machine hosts on my Dell (Windows Vista) laptop.  Works great.  I've wanted to check out OpenSolaris for a while, and it's pretty slick, but  I'd be surprised if Solaris recovers the market it has lost to Linux.
Anyway - the Solaris X-server was not configured to emulate a 3 button mouse by default.  Fortunately, Google found the following easy 3-button emulation fix, so I can now happily cut and paste in the Solaris VM on my laptop.  The fix just adds an 'Emulate3Button' line to the mouse InputDevice block in /etc/X11/xorg.conf file:
Section "InputDevice"
        Identifier      "Mouse0"
    Driver      "vboxmouse"
    Option      "CorePointer"
    Option      "Device" "/dev/kdmouse"
        Option          "Protocol"              "auto"
        Option          "ZAxisMapping"          "4 5"
    Option      "Emulate3Buttons"   "true" 
EndSection