TOPIC: MERGE
How complexity can blind you
17th August 2025Visitors may not have noticed it, but I was having a lot of trouble with this website. Intermittent slowdowns beset any attempt to add new content or perform any other administration. This was not happening on any other web portal that I had, even one sharing the same publishing software.
Even so, WordPress did get the blame at first, at least when deactivating plugins had no effect. Then, it was the turn of the web server, resulting in a move to something more powerful and my leaving Apache for Nginx at the same time. Redis caching was another suspect, especially when things got in a twist on the new instance. As if that were not enough, MySQL came in for some scrutiny too.
Finally, another suspect emerged: Cloudflare. Either some settings got mangled or something else was happening, but cutting out that intermediary was enough to make things fly again. Now, I use bunny.net for DNS duties instead, and the simplification has helped enormously; the previous layering was no help with debugging. With a bit of care, I might add some other tools behind the scenes while taking things slowly to avoid confusion in the future.
Evoluent Vertical Mouse 3 Configuration in Ubuntu 9.10
31st October 2009On popping Ubuntu 9.10 onto a newly built PC, I noticed that the button mappings weren't as I had expected them to be. The button just below the wheel no longer acted like a right mouse button on a conventional mouse, and it really was throwing me. The cause was found to be in a file name evoluent-verticalmouse3.fdi that is found either in /usr/share/hal/fdi/policy/20thirdparty/ or /etc/hal/fdi/policy/.
So, to get things back as I wanted, I changed the following line:
<merge key="input.x11_options.ButtonMapping" type="string">1 2 2 4 5 6 7 3 8</merge>
to:
<merge key="input.x11_options.ButtonMapping" type="string">1 2 3 4 5 6 7 3 8</merge>
If there is no sign of the file on your system, then create one named evoluent-verticalmouse3.fdi in /etc/hal/fdi/policy/ with the following content and you should be away. All that's needed to set things to rights is to disconnect the mouse and reconnect it again in both cases.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<deviceinfo version="0.2">
<device>
<match key="info.capabilities" contains="input.mouse">
<match key="input.product" string="Kingsis Peripherals Evoluent VerticalMouse 3">
<merge key="input.x11_driver" type="string">evdev</merge>
<merge key="input.x11_options.Emulate3Buttons" type="string">no</merge>
<merge key="input.x11_options.EmulateWheelButton" type="string">0</merge>
<merge key="input.x11_options.ZAxisMapping" type="string">4 5</merge>
<merge key="input.x11_options.ButtonMapping" type="string">1 2 3 4 5 6 7 3 8</merge>
</match>
</match>
</device>
</deviceinfo>
While I may not have appreciated the sudden change, it does show how you remap buttons on these mice, and that can be no bad thing. Saying that, hardware settings can be personal things, so it's best not to go changing defaults based on one person's preferences. It just goes to show how valuable discussions like that on Launchpad about this matter can be. For one, I am glad to know what happened and how to make things the way that I want them to be, though I realise that it may not suit everyone; that makes me reticent about asking for such things to be made the standard settings.