I need to make a confession. I’m a fan of Microsoft products. Well, to be specific, I like their range of computer accessories. I own a Xbox360 gamepad for gaming on my PC, I use the Wireless Mobile 4000 daily, and carry around the original Arch when traveling. So, when I read about Microsoft Touch Mouse a couple days a go, I’m excited. Yes, I’m actually excited about an upcoming release of a microsoft product :D. After the mediocre Arch Touch Mouse, At last, a worthy contender for the apple magic mouse! Also important to note that, starting from Maverick Meerkat, Ubuntu will natively support multitouch 🙂
To feed my curiosity, I decided to borrow an Apple Magic Mouse from my friend, and try to hook it to my Lucid box.
Native support for the magic mouse is available on Maverick Meerkat. On Lucid you need to install a backported driver, which I will cover on another post.
What works:
- Pairing
Well, pairing the mouse is easy. Just flip the switch, search for the mouse from bluetooth manager, pair. - Moving the cursor
I believe this one is self explanatory 🙂 - Mouse click
Left-click, right-click, and middle-click works. Just place your finger in the appropriate area of the touch surface - Vertical & horizontal scroll
Not out of the box. As I said earlier, for scrolling to work, you need to install a backported driver. The magic mouse’s touch area is placed at the front half of the mouse. You perform scrolling by swiping your finger vertically for vertical scroll, or horizontally for… wait for it…. a Horizontal scroll!
Problems:
- Multitouch does not work on Lucid. If you need multitouch on your magic mouse, you need to upgrade to Maverick
- The magic mouse is quite flat, so there’s no place for the ball of my hand to rest. While it add to the gorgeousness of the apparatus , using it actually make my hand sore
- I can’t really tell where the left-click area on the touch surface ends, and where the middle-click area begins. So oftentimes, instead of left-clicking to select a tab on firefox, I end up closing it with a middle-click. I guess it’ll get better with time.
- The magic mouse is a 1300 dpi mouse, just like the wireless mobile 4000. But I actually feel that the magic mouse is less precise than my daily mouse, the Wireless Mobile 4000
- Didn’t I say that pairing works? Well, I did. The problem is, the magic mouse keeps on crapping my bluetooth adapter. Connection lost randomly, and also lost when the screen is locked. Things got better when I switched from blueman to the stock bluetooth manager. Oh and it also doesn’t auto pair. Blargh