Most any standard wheel or optical mouse should work with Linux with no effort at all, including scroll wheel mice.

Laptops can often be taughth to emulate a scroll wheel using their builtin touchpad or TrackPoint. There's a page on the Thinkwiki site which explains how to emulate a scroll on Thinkpad laptops.

Scroll wheel tips

There are a number of hidden uses of the scroll wheel waiting to be discovered. Try these:

• Use the scroll wheel over "tabs" area of the Konqueror browser to quickly switch between them
• Use the scroll wheel over a volume icon to raise or lower the volume.