Scrolling using mouse wheel

Richard L. Hamilton

2011-07-27 15:42:14 UTC

I'm not using that combination; in either case, I think I'm using TightVNC on my Suns, in one case on Solaris 9 (SunOS 5.9), in another on a development release of what will eventually become Solaris 11 (SunOS 5.11).

You don't actually identify your Solaris release. Solaris 2.x (x = 0-5, 5.1, 6) corresponds to SunOS 5.x (uname -r); for x > 6, it's just Solaris x = SunOS 5.x. I think the earliest to have any
support for scroll wheels was either Solaris 8 with a bunch of
patches, or Solaris 9. That support was in basically a couple of
places: the X server (which you're probably not using if you're using vnc, since I don't think the way of having vnc available in a regular X server to remote control a running session was generally available on Solaris), and the various toolkits.

Solaris follows the convention on other X based systems where (since core X11 only defines X and Y motion for pointers) vertical scroll wheel steps map to clicks of fictional mouse buttons 4 and 5 (not sure which corresponds to scrolling up vs down), and, in much more recent versions, may deal with horizontal scroll wheel steps similarly as fictional mouse buttons 6 and 7.

So the X server (or Xvnc server) has to handle the input (from physical device or from the network, respectively) and send the corresponding mouse button 4-5 (or 4-7) events to applications; but the applications (usually the GUI toolkits they use like Athena, Motif, GTK+ (GNOME), Qt (KDE)) have to know what to do with them too. That didn't happen all at once in Solaris; while GNOME and KDE probably always handled them, Motif was slower to support scroll wheels. But they can typically be added after-the fact with the appropriate magic .Xdefaults (or per-app resource file) entries to define accelerators for scroll widgets. Search google groups (Usenet archives) for info; as I recall, this was discussed quite a bit at the time.

To check if the VNC client and server are even passing the scroll related events, run xev on the remote end; it should report events for pressing and releasing the mouse buttons I mentioned when the scroll wheel is being used, if they work. If they don't work, make sure that it's not the VNC client (try a different VNC server).

Like I said, the one I'm running (TightVNC, 1.2.8 I think, from the blastwave collection of pre-built freeware for Solaris - which may install a bunch of duplicate dependencies since it runs across a range of Solaris versions, the earlier of which may not include suitable versions of various dependencies) handles at least vertical scrolling just fine.

Since Xvnc servers generally start life as X servers with VNC instead of physical device support, I can't rule out that some of them might have some configuration files to fool with, although since VNC protocol hides most of the differences that a physical X server would have to deal with among real hardware, I've never had to do that.

Post by Jeff Thompson
How can I get wheel mouse scrolling working? I'm running free VNC 4.1.3
on Windows XP sp3 and connecting to a Solaris (Sun 5.0) box. I'd like to
be able to scroll the Solaris windows using my mouse wheel.
Jeff Thompson
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