anybody know xmodmap?

[dep]

greets, everybody . . .

i have given up on getting my kensington expert mouse four-button 
trackball to behave as expected (and documented) under xfree. it has 
always had two left buttons and two right buttons, and this is fine 
with me -- i've always used the upper left as the left, upper right as 
the right, and pretty much ignored the other two. but since i installed 
suse-9.1 both of those buttons are mapped as middle buttons. i am 
spending a lot of time in edit > undo. the lower left is now the lmb, 
the lower right the rmb. (my suspicion is that somewhere in the bowels 
of its incomprehensible maze of configurations, yast or sax has 
misidentified the mouse and has left a little mouse dropping that i 
cannot find; suse seems to like to do me favors that i don't want 
done.) so . . .

i'm given to understand, perhaps incorrectly, that xmodmap, properly 
invoked, can overrule everything else and give me not just what i'd be 
happy with -- the old two left, two right configuration -- but perhaps 
even something i would find truly useful: upper left=lmb; upper 
right=rmb; lower left=lmb draglock; lower right=center button. i 
believe that its "pointer" section deals with this.

problem is, i have found the xmodmap docs a little on the 
incomprehensible side. and before reinventing the wheel i thought i'd 
ask if anybody has any experience with this sort of thing. at this 
point, i do not know even how to refer to the various buttons on the 
trackball.

alternately, anybody know of docs better than those provided by the 
manpage?

thanks.
-- 
dep

The secularists have not wrecked divine things; but the secularists
have wrecked secular things, if that is any comfort to them.
				    -- G.K. Chesterton, "Orthodoxy"