I have a Logitech Anywhere MX mouse that has a bunch of buttons. Logitech provides drivers for Windows and Mac to configure the buttons and I like to set up the scrollwheel-left action to go the previous page in Chrome and the scrollwheel-right action to go to the next page.
In Debian Wheezy (also I guess in Ubuntu 12.04 and up) I got this to work using imwheel. Imwheel is a program to tie actions to mouse wheel and thumb buttons. Here is my configuration:
/etc/X11/imwheel/imwheel/startup.conf
IMWHEEL_START=1
IMWHEEL_PARAMS='-b "1 2 3 8 9"'
~/.imwheelrc
"^chromium$"
# To previous page
None, Thumb1, Alt_L|Left
None, Left, Alt_L|Left
# To next page
None, Thumb2, Alt_L|Right
None, Right, Alt_L|Right
This makes the mousewheel-left and first thumb button go to the previous page in Chromium and the mousewheel-right and the second thumb button go to the next page.
Strangely if IMWHEEL_START=1 then the left and right wheel actions are reversed. If I start imwheel manually it works. I’m now having it start with Xfce4’s Menu > Settings > Session and Startup thingie. That works for me. If anyone comes up with a decent solution please leave it in the comments :)
/Edit 2015-01-03
imwheel Logitech RX250 settings for Chrome/Chromium
Here is my imwheel config for the Logitech RX250 mouse. This mouse has a scrollwheel that can be pressed left and right and I use those actions for previous and next page in Chrome, respectively.
/etc/X11/imwheel/starup.conf:
IMWHEEL_START=0
IMWHEEL_PARAMS='-b "6 7"'
/etc/X11/imwheel/imwheelrc:
"^Chromium$"
None, Left, Alt_L|Left
None, Right, Alt_L|Right
I don’t have a ~/.imwheelrc. I get confused when there are two config files and things aren’t working. It seems to work like this so I’ll just keep it this way.
I run imwheel from the Xfce Startup menu. Same as before, when using IMWHEEL_START=0 strange things happen (namely: the Wheel Right action is changed to scroll down). When called from Xfce’s menu all is well. This works for me.
/Edit
To add support for google-chrome-stable (aka Google Chrome), use this window header:
"^*Google\ Chrome$"
In Xubuntu 15.04 I had to use this window header instead:
"Google\ Chrome$"
/Edit 2
My Logitech M325 mouse has its left and right wheel tilt buttons working in Xubuntu 15.04 without imwheel even started. That kept me busy for an hour or so. Not starting imwheel was the solution there.