supporting navigation mouse buttons in Debian

["Michael Gilbert" <michael.s.gilbert@gmail.com>]

Hello,

I was recently browsing the web on a windows box and realized that
over the last 4 years, I had forgotten how nice it is to be able
browse back/forward with a single button click.  So I set about
enabling this functionality on my Debian box.  I found this gentoo doc
(http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Mouse_Nav_Buttons) very helpful.

Now, my question is, would it be possible to work toward supporting
nav buttons "out of the box" in Debian?  I know that there are
probably a lot of issues because there is no hardware standard for the
nav buttons, but maybe there would be a way to store configuration for
all the hardware.  The gentoo doc is geared toward enabling
back/forward nav in mozilla only, so there may need to be some thought
put into a way to generalize this.

Is anyone else interested in making nav buttons work "out of the box",
and would it be worthwhile to work on?  This would likely involve
(hopefully minor) changes to a lot of parts of the distribution.

I think this capability is important because I remember when I first
switched that I was disappointed that the nav buttons didn't work.  I
stuck with it, but it could be enough to turn away a significant
number of new users who are stuck in the windows mud.  One of the
gnome HIG is along the lines of provide an interface that the user
expects and don't suprise them.  I look forward to any thoughts on
this matter.

Regards,
Mike