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



Hello Joey,

> 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..

This is a bug in GPM which i (informally) brought up in connection
with support of serial console devices on debian-devel some time ago.

GPM needs to access the Virtual Console Master (= /dev/tty0). But since
/dev/tty0 was a symlink to /dev/console in the early years of Linux, the
author assumed that /dev/console is the VC master. Now it's the other
way round /dev/console -> /dev/tty0. That is the reason that this bug
goes unnoticed for most of the Debian users.  If you happen to use a
Serial Console device than GPM won't even start ...  The same is true
for SVGAlib applications and some of the X-Servers.

So the bug is easy to fix: Just substitute /dev/console with /dev/tty0
in the sources.  (I have cc-ed this to the package maintainer, because
i think he will fix it without a formal bug report :)

Cheers,
  Dominik

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