RE: Stupid newbie question solved, plus more stupid newbie tricks !
Hallelujah!
Well, there's good news and a funny/sad story. Now I understand why friends
of mine said I probably knew enough about Linux to be dangerous.
I am sending it all back to the list so the info will be searchable in the
archives.
The good news is that several people wrote me to tell me to make a symlink
to /dev/psaux by doing 'ln -s /dev/psaux /dev/mouse' and that worked.
Thanks to everyone who responded!
The bad news is the last thing I had done before typing that was to change
the mouse setting in xf86config to 'Microsoft' instead of PS/2. That made
the mouse pointer behaves unpredictably when X finally started. Further bad
news comes in the form of settings I made at install time, telling it I
wanted a graphical login screen, and the fact that the window manager I
installed (Window Maker) doesn't understand keystrokes to move around the
screen. The icing on the cake was that, knowing I was not planning to
dual-boot, I eliminated the number of seconds LILO waits before starting to
boot.
So on boot, I got a graphical login screen, and could log in, but it goes
directly to x-windows, where my Window Maker doesn't seem to understand any
keyboard commands, and my mouse pointer zips up to the upper left corner of
the screen and stays there. I couldn't do anything. I couldn't even exit X
to reboot! I had to shut it down dirty.
Since I am at work, I didn't have my rescue floppy handy, so I went and made
a copy of tomsrtbt (http://www.toms.net/rb/), and while it was booting, I
looked up how to mount my hard drive. When I mounted it, mount warned me
that I ought to run e2fsck. When I ran e2fsck, it gave me a warning that
running it on a mounted filesystem might cause severe damage!
This left me in a quandary. Should I access the drive while it was dirty?
Or risk the damage? Fortunately I finally realized that what e2fsck meant
for me to do was unmount the drive, then run e2fsck, then remount it. I did
so, and edited my XF86Config to put the right mouse (PS/2) back in. After
the reboot, I could use the mouse to exit xwindows!
Next problem was getting rid of the graphical login screen I had specified
prematurely, xdm. After searching around on the net and on my hard drive I
determined what I needed to do was '/usr/sbin/update-rc.d -f xdm remove'.
Finally X was working, but only in 640x480. My laptop is capable of 800x600
resolution, so I went and found someone with the same laptop as I
(http://www.raster.com/950n/) who had posted their XF86Config. I copied it
into /etc/X11/, but starting X only resulted in a message saying that font
'fixed' could not be found. Comparing the two files, I noticed that the
donor file had only one line of 'FontPath "unix/:-1"' but the working (at
low res) file had about 12 such lines each with specific font names. I cut
and pasted in the specific font names, removed the 'unix/:-1' line, and
tried again, and now it works.
The most important lesson I learned is don't install xdm until you know X is
solid, if ever!
Thanks again to those who helped! And if anyone needs to get potato running
on an old AST laptop, I know more than I used to about the process.
Chris Owens
-----Original Message-----
From: Owens, Christopher [mailto:christopher.owens@analog.com]
Sent: Monday, January 28, 2002 1:38 PM
To: debian-laptop@lists.debian.org
Subject: Stupid newbie question: eraserhead-style mouse
Kind people,
This is my first question to the list, and it is the first time I have tried
to install linux since the kernel was version 1.2.
I have installed potato on an old laptop using http. The laptop is an AST
Ascentia 950n, and claims to have a P120, 16MB of RAM, and I have upgraded
the hard drive to a 5.7GB unit. I have net thanks to a PCMCIA network card.
I think when I installed, I may have had the built-in mouse disabled. When
I try to start X now, I get an error that it can't open /dev/mouse, and,
indeed, there does not seem to be any /dev/mouse. X has never successfully
run on this system.
Microsoft Mouse Driver version 8.20 works on a DOS boot floppy I have handy,
and the mouse is usable.
How can I get a /dev/mouse?
Thanks for any help.
Chris Owens
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