Beige G3 and USB Mouse
Greetings,
(For the time-strapped please skip down to the ***)
I have a revision a Beige G3/233 that I have tried repeatedly to install
Debian on. Ironically, I have had much more luck with my Power Mac 6500,
granted it has no mouse, keyboard, or monitor.
I have been able to successfully install LinuxPPC 2000 Q4, Mandrake 8.0, and
Yellow Dog 2.0 on this machine, but found these distros to be sloppy,
bloated, and quite overwhelming. After installing Debian on the 6500 (I use
unstable and find it to be quite stable), I fell in love with apt and dpkg.
Those tools, along with Mac OS X and Fink have really helped me learn my way
around UNIX. Unfortunately, the lack of multiple kernel versions, as well as
USB and video card configuration issues has prevented me from learning the
finer points of UNIX.
***
I am able to get Debian to install, but haven't had much luck getting it to
a useable desktop state.
Before I start on the questions, here is my basic system configuration:
Rev. A Gossamer G3/233 (over-clocked to 300, but that shouldn't matter ;)
384 MB RAM
60 GB IDE HD
OrangeMicro USB/FireWire PCI card
ATI Rage Orion 128 16 MB
Question 1:
I understand I have 2 options, BootX and quik. I prefer BootX, since it
doesn't muck with my firmware (Forth is scary stuff), provides me with a
graphical prompt, allows me to pick a kernel quickly, and allows me to
easily do a worry-free triple boot into OS 9, OS X, and Debian (granted I
really only _need_ OS 9). Is there any major advantage to using quik over
BootX, and will it help at all with question 2?...
Question 2:
Short version: How do I get a USB IntelliMouse Optical working with Debian
on a Beige G3? (see long version for what I've tried)
Long version: Believe it or not, I have been able to "correctly" configure
XFree86, although I didn't get it hardware accelerated, only through fbdev.
I am quite willing to hack around with this myself. But _not_ with a
one-button mouse!
Booting Debian under the provided kernel 2.2.19 (from the Debian-iMac
package) the boot time messages showed clearly that it recognized my USB
card, and even my IntelliMouse (it called it by name!), but I found it nigh
impossible to get gpm to recognize it (I really didn't want to try XFree86
again with mouse-button-emulation). I tried this first under straight
potato, then upgraded to testing, tried again, and finally under unstable,
with the same results each time (nothing). I tried with both mice plugged in
(the other is a single-button Apple ADB Mouse), and with only the USB one
plugged in (with a shutdown and cold start in between each).
With this multitude of configurations, I tried every possible configuration
combination of gpm. I also checked for /dev/usbmouse, which to my dismay,
never existed under potato, woody, or unstable. I tried making /dev/usbmouse
a symlink to /input/mice (which did exist). I tried making /dev/mouse a
symlink to both of those. I also (somehow) received instructions on how to
properly mknod a mouse dev file, and tried this in numerous spots, running
through the above-mentioned procedures several more times. At one point I
thought I had it, screamed out with joy, and then realized I was holding the
ADB mouse (I was in about my 20th hour of this).
I also messed around with loading and unloading kernel modules, but having
little experience in that arena, I didn't go too far.
One thing I did not try was a 2.4.x kernel, since 2.2.19 was clearly seeing
the USB card and mouse. So, obviously, my question is, how to I get this
working?
-Mike
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