[Gllug] Erratic Mouse Behaviour

[Mike Brodbelt]

On Wed, 2001-11-28 at 11:09, James.Rocks at equant.com wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> The mouse is almost impossible to control & jumps erratically from point to
> point on the screen with windows popping up and moving.
> 
> I've been looking up on the net and the common solution cited for this is
> hardware (i.e. dirty contacts and so on) but this is not a hardware issue
> as I have tried two mice and both work absolutely perfectly under Win 2K &
> Me. As I say above one mouse is an optical mouse (MS) so I figure it MUST
> be OS support or configuration related.

It'll be the mouse protocol. I'm assuming all your problems are in X -
of so, go to your /etc/X11/XF86Config file (that's not always the
location, but it's the most probable), and find the mouse section. Mine
looks like this:-

Section "InputDevice"
        Identifier  "Mouse0"
        Driver      "mouse"
        Option      "Protocol" "ImPS/2"
        Option      "Device" "/dev/mouse"
        Option      "Buttons" "5"
        Option      "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
EndSection

The "Protocol" line is the important one. Most PS/2 mice will work
happily with the "PS/2" protocol, but you'll not get the wheel to work.
For that, you need to use one of the extended protocols, and using the
wrong one will result in the type of behaviour you're seeing. I'd guess
SuSE has autoconfigured it for you, and misdetected it.

Look at http://www.xfree86.org/current/mouse.html for details.
 
> For information the hardware I am using is as follows:
> 
> ABit KA7-100 motherboard (with HighPoint ATA 100 bus), Athlon 1Ghz CPU,
> 512Mb RAM, removable hard drives (test drive was a 10Gb UDMA 2 drive), SB
> Live Soundcard, Diamond Viper V770 Ultra video card, Compaq 3132 NIC,
> Microsoft Keyboard & Intellimouse & 17" Belinea (Mitsubishi Diamondtron
> tube) monitor.
> 
> I re-installed the OS as a lower version than 2.4 (2.1.26 I think)

Gaahh. I hope you haven't - 2.1.26 is an ancient, *unstable* series
kernel. You should be going for kernel 2.4.16 at the moment, or simply
sticking with the kernel provided by your distribution unless you need
newer features....

> problems seem to have largely disappeared ... does anyone have any idea why
> this is and how I can upgrade successfully to the latest Kernel (if,
> indeed, that is the issue)?

It's most likely to be your X config, not the kernel. Try that first. If
you want to upgrade the kernel, download the newest from
ftp.uk.kernel.org, unpack, and read the README.

HTH,

Mike


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