I've used it to detect the movement of a mousewheel and pipe text commands to an MP3 player
Let me know if you want to go into more detail

cheshire cat :)

In addition to GPM, if your interested in doing some c coding (and you're on linux), you could wrap parts of svgalib with inline. There is a Linux::Svgalib on CPAN but I don't think the author encapsulated the mouse api.

update: just for fun here's a simple inline script that uses svgalib to capture and report on mouse clicks. caveat hackour - your mouse inits may be different, you need to run as root, need to run on console (may drastically interfere with X), etc, etc, etc ...

#!/usr/bin/perl

use Inline C => DATA =>
            LIBS => '-lvga';

mouse_start();
mouse_loop();

__END__
__C__

#include <vga.h>
#include <vgamouse.h>

int mouse_start( )
{
    vga_init();
    vga_setmousesupport(1);
    mouse_init("/dev/mouse", MOUSE_IMPS2, MOUSE_DEFAULTSAMPLERATE);
}

int mouse_loop( )
{
    int button, leftpressed, middlepressed, rightpressed;
    leftpressed = middlepressed = rightpressed = 0;

    for (;;) {
        mouse_update();
        button = mouse_getbutton();

        if (button & MOUSE_LEFTBUTTON) {
                if (!leftpressed) {
                printf( "LEFT PRESSED!\n" );
                leftpressed = 1;
                        }
                } else
            leftpressed = 0;

        if (button & MOUSE_MIDDLEBUTTON)  {
                if (!middlepressed) {
                printf( "MIDDLE PRESSED!\n" );
                middlepressed = 1;
            }
                } else
            middlepressed = 0;

        if (button & MOUSE_RIGHTBUTTON)  {
                if (!rightpressed) {
                printf( "RIGHT PRESSED!\n" );
                rightpressed = 1;
            }
                } else
            rightpressed = 0;
    }
}
[download]

-derby