[Edgy] Fourth mouse button isn't supported

Thanks for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. Could you please add the contents of your '/etc/X11/xorg.conf' file? Thanks in advance.

This is a very common problem that is discussed in the forums.
There is even a how-to on getting mouse buttons working at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ManyButtonsMouseHowto.

Apparently it isn't to hard to edit the xorg.conf to support all mice buttons, but a lot of people are of the opinion that this shouldn't be necessary. Its a step too far for a lot of newbies.

Ideally what is needed is a nice simple gui to configure the xorg.conf (and Nautilus) to support mice with more than three buttons. Editing of the xorg.conf monitor configurations would also be very useful.

Occurs in Feisty as well. Can't the default xorg.conf be modified according to the given instruction?

Yes it's no problem for experienced users but ubuntu should be easy to use for newbies as well ;)
What I'd suggest would be a nice "default configuration" even if there's no GUI. So the up and down buttons (which are mapped to button 4 and 5 in AFAIK all mice) should toggle forward and back in all webbrowsers. This is (even if this is not a good argument *g) also the way it works in windows.

I mean: can't someone with access to this part of Ubuntu easily modify the xorg.conf by default so that users don't have to? Or is there some good reason not to do this at present? If this is a simple change, it may merit somewhat higher priority than if it would be difficult to get it working for all users by default.

From a usability standpoint, the important fact is that someone who has never modified xorg.conf before will not know what to do. This is bad because from the perspective of a Windows user where everything just works, they end up having to search the internet just to figure out how to enable the forward and back buttons on their mouse.

Many users will not even think that searching the internet will give them the answer, and thus they will likely chalk up another impression that "oh it must be unsupported because it's goofy 'ole Linux".

In conclusion: Yes, it is just a matter of changing the default of the forward and back mouse buttons which does not seem like a severe "bug"... BUT the important concern is the bad first impression it gives to people that are seeing Linux for the first time.

That is exactly what I am saying. I was asking why someone, on the Ubuntu team, who is capable of committing code that will subsequently be distributed to all Ubuntu users, does not commit the fix given to the main repository, which will then change the default file *for all users*. Apparently it's not so simple, according to Bryce Harrington on bug #42678: "Currently, there's not a clear way of getting this to work out of the box." That's all I was asking. I think we're in perfect agreement that this is a noticeable and annoying loss of behavior compared to Windows and it should be fixed.