i finally got my mouse to do what it was doing before i switched monitors, a month or so ago. previously, i could select text and click anywhere and paste the text with the left side mouse button, but since i got my new monitor, i have been unable to do this, and unable to reconfigure xorg, because when i run sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg i get an error message that says FATAL: Error inserting battery (/lib/modules/2.6.24-19-generic/kernel/drivers/acpi/battery.ko): No such device. so i booted into safe mode and moved battery.ko to my home directory, rebooted, logged in and ran sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg again, and this time it, not unpredictably, said FATAL: Error inserting battery (/lib/modules/2.6.24-19-generic/kernel/drivers/acpi/battery.ko): No such file or directory.

i decided to try a different track, which worked for the problem of my mouse not working the way i want it to, but didn’t do anything to solve the problem with the xorg configurator. i booted into recovery mode, deleted the “InputDevice -> Configured Mouse” section from my current xorg.conf, and replaced it with the “Configured Mouse” section from the xorg.conf file that was for my previous monitor, rebooted, and – voilá – the mouse now does exactly what i wanted. apparently it has something to do with the lines that say:

Option          "Device"          "/dev/input/mice"
Option          "Protocol"          "ImPS/2"
Option          "ZAxisMapping"          "4 5"

unfortunately, i still have the problem with the xorg configurator crashing when it tries to find a battery that doesn’t exist, but this is really low on my list of priorities to fix, because xorg is already configured the way i want it…

by the way, apparently battery.ko is a part of acpi, which, if i understand correctly, is something only laptops should have… and this computer is definitely not a laptop…