Woody serial mouse problems solved in BIOS?
Hi - after 3 weeks messing with Debian Woody bf2.4, I found out---
'standard' 9 pin serial mice may not work on the desktop (kde etc)
......................
until you set the BIOS IRQ and memory address of serial ports 'ttyS0' and
/or 'ttyS1', to match the
settings that the '/etc/serial.conf' file contains. Obvious, but I didn't
find this using web searches.
I see some reference to port settings as the boot messages
appear,
(you can get them back with 'dmesg' to look at... alt +
page up or down, to scroll pages)
You can change the IRQ and address of each serial port setting in Woody
using
dpkg-reconfigure setserial (serial.conf file is in /etc), but it's
better to take a look at the
last lines of the file manually, and check them against what the BIOS is
set to, and
alter and save..
My BIOS is on a ATX 586 mobo, it can set various port values, the
'default'
expected in bf 2.4 seems to be
ttyS0 (= com1) address 3F8 IRQ
4
ttyS1 address 2F8 IRQ 3 (= 'Com2')
so I matched those and at last I have a graphics mouse!!!!
There are loads of references to setting up the XFree86 config file with
the mouse parameters -
but no-one seems to have logged these possible problems from the BIOS
serial port settings,
if you have them on your BIOS (under 'peripherals' on my mobo). The Linux
OS does not seem
to realise what the bios is set to.
If you haven't looked at the XFree86 log file in /var/log do so - it
shows if the mouse bits are
loading correctly or not at the end of it.
In my case I think I may have to hold a mouse button down as the 'gdm'
system starts up,
it hangs until the mouse is moved about - but at least an 'Auto' mouse
protocol setting on the XFree86
setup ( dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xfree86 ) works my ancient serial
mouse,
-- but note,
it looks like when that dpkg prog. is run, it puts in an assumed
symlink setting (e.g to ttyS0) as
something like '/dev/input/mice' which is not much use, as
everyone's advising us to
use a symlink '/dev/mouse' ... so either change the
XF86Config-4 config file (in /etc/X11)
manually (which means not using the dpkg-reconfigure mode again) -- or
make
the symlink by command, to match the XF86Config-4 entry.
I'm not that good at symlink but the command is
ln -s /dev/ttyS0 /dev/mouse (for
/dev/mouse on ==Com1 !)
Would be useful if someone can tell me how to 'undo' a symlink!
The only other thing I messed around with was the 3 (or so) mouse
modules - if that's what they are - in the kernel config file settings
list
(in /boot) ... but I'm unsure exactly which parts were essential.
Leave that until final exhaustion of possibility.
And finally, I use 'ee' (apt-get install ee) editor, I like to minimise
Debian pains...
Any comments appreciated, and apologies for any typo's or duff
info.
Hope this gets some other newbie Debian v3 users out of a jam and
avoid
that trip to get the ps2 mouse.
I see the greatness of Debian's approach - but 'they' do leave us first
timers to find out
by trial and error sometimes?
Paul Hailey
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