Tilt wheel & Logitech mx610

I’ve got a Logitech MX610 cordless laser mouse. One of its nicer features is a tilt wheel. Unfortunately, this is still difficult to get working in Ubuntu Linux. The problems:

1. The tilt wheel is only supported when you’re using the “evdev” driver. Ubuntu doesn’t do this by default.
2. Xorg refuses to load an event device if it isn’t named /dev/input/eventX where X is a single digit.
3. The MX610 contains an USB keyboard as well, which is used for certain buttons. The mouse and the keyboard components have the same name, so the standard tutorials for getting the tilt wheel working don’t work.

After a bit of twiddling, I got everything to work. Edit your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file and replace your mouse definition with this:

Section "InputDevice"
   Identifier  "Configured Mouse"
   Driver      "evdev"
   Option      "CorePointer"
   Option      "Device"    "/dev/input/event9"
   Option      "ZAxisMapping" "4 5 7 6"
   Option      "Buttons"   "9"
   Option      "Resolution" "800"
EndSection

Place the following in /etc/udev/rules.d/66-logitech_mouse.rules:

KERNEL!="event*", GOTO="logimouse_rules_end"
ENV{ID_CLASS}!="mouse", GOTO="logimouse_rules_end"
ENV{ID_MODEL}!="USB_Receiver", GOTO="logimouse_rules_end"
ENV{ID_VENDOR}!="Logitech", GOTO="logimouse_rules_end"

ACTION=="remove", RUN+="/bin/rm /dev/input/event9"

ACTION!="add", GOTO="logimouse_rules_end"
RUN+="/bin/bash -c '/bin/mknod /dev/input/event9 c ${MAJOR} ${MINOR}"

LABEL="logimouse_rules_end"

Reboot, and enjoy your tilt wheel!