Comment 2 for bug 272334

This is very unfortunate.

I do not want to set up xinput scripts for a simple definition I was once able to just set. Besides, running :
xinput set-int-prop "Logitech Optical USB Mouse" "Emulate3Buttons" 32 0
Does not work. xinput support only integer and nor boolean datatypes anyway (I tried with 8 and 16 too).
As I understand, the hal driven configuration doesn't even use the "mouse" driver which accepts the Emulate3Buttons property, but the evdev one, which does not. There is no clear explanation how can such a definition be set in /etc/hal/fdi/, even not in https://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/Config.

All in all, there should be an accessible option for the average user, like me, to turn off 3 buttons mouse emulation for the sake of playing games, especially when he (like the vast majority of users) already have a perfectly good 3 button mouse. I do not have to learn the hal object model, the xinput syntax and the evdev API in order to do this. This option was dropped in intrepid, and on that basis I beg to differ about the closure of this bug.