wrong /dev/console messes up mouse -- why?

[Joey Hess <joey@kite.preferred.com>]

I touched on this in an earlier message about making a debian box run
headless (turns out the problem I encoutnered was my mistake). Anyway,
it's piqued my curiosity about something:

In debian, /dev/console is generally a symlink to /dev/tty0. I managed to
mess that up so /dev/console linked to /dev/tty1. Most stuff continued to
work fine, the only casulty was my mouse. I have a serial mouse, and I run
gpm and also start up X. This works fine, the 2 don't normally conflict.
If /dev/console is linked to /dev/tty1, though, they do conflict, and X
only gets some of the mouse events it should get, leading to a choppy
mouse movement at best. 

Anyone know why /dev/console is important to gpm or to x in this way? I
don't think it's a bug, I just wanna figure out _why_ this happens..

-- 
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