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Somehow, I ended up without any xmodmap files on my Ubuntu install, so I had to find a different approach to this problem.

Take a look at the **xinput** command. 

    xinput list | grep -i mouse

which lists information about your mouse.  It shows my mouse is "Dell Premium USB Optical Mouse" and also that I have "Macintosh mouse button emulation".  Armed with that info, I can 

    xinput get-button-map "Dell Premium USB Optical Mouse"

which gives me a listing that looks like

    1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

Here is the useful, required knowledge.  My mouse has, theoretically, 18 buttons.  Each button's default action has the same name as it's button number.  In other words, button 1 does action 1, button 4 does action 4, etc.  Action 0 means "off".

The **position** in the listing shows the function assigned to that button.  So if my button map read

    1 3 2 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 

this would mean button 1 (position 1) does action 1 (normal left button), button 2 (position 2) does action 3 (middle button) and button 3 (position 3) does action 2 (right button).

To make a left handed mouse all you would need would be a button map that starts

    3 2 1 4 5 .....

Or, in your case, it looks like you want the middle button to do the same thing as button 1 (left button) so your map needs to start

    1 1 3 ....

I'd reset my mouse button mappings thus:

    xinput set-button-map "Dell Premium USB Optical Mouse" 1 1 3 5 6 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

In your case, you may have a different number of mapped buttons and have some special button map already defined.  Likwely, your mouse has a different name, too.  First, get your mouse's "name". Then, use the **get-button-map** operation to find your base button map. finally, use the **set-button-map** option, modifying button 2 to do action 1.

This is not a permanent change.  I added the necessary code to my *.bashrc* so it executes every time I login or open a terminal.

Hope this helps.