problem with mouse on ancient Compaq laptop

["A. Lester Buck III" <debian-user-list@compact.com>]

Hi,

I have a Compaq LTE5300 laptop, circa 1998, and I am running
etch on it.  I've run various flavors of Debian on it off and on
over the years, but I haven't used it regularly.  [That wouldn't
be much fun at all...]

The machine has a Pentium 133 processor, 80MB (max) of RAM, and
a PCMCIA network card.  No CD-ROM, so I boot from floppies and
do a network install.  After eight to ten hours, it's done. :-)

X.org comes up with some minor screen errors along the left and
top edges, but generally usable.  But after much horsing around,
I still can't get the mouse working.  This laptop has a flakey
trackpoint/eraser mouse that hardly ever works, and when it does it
"drifts" across the screen, so I always use an external, plain,
three button mouse plugged into the external PS/2 port.

I started worrying that the external mouse was just broken, or
the external mouse controller hardware/port had died, so I ran
PC Check diagnostics from floppy and verified that the external
mouse hardware works fine.  The BIOS is very simple and has no
concept of switching mice from trackpoint to external port.

In the dmesg log, I see:

    PNP: PS/2 Controller [PNP0303,PNP0f13] at 0x60,0x64 irq 1,12
    serio: i8042 KBD port at 0x60,0x64 irq 1
    mice: PS/2 mouse device common for all mice

so some mouse hardware is detected on the PS/2 hardware, though
I guess not necessarily the external mouse.

I tried a simple test I read on the web about cat'ing /dev/mouse,
/dev/psaux, and /dev/input/mice and seeing what shows garbage
when the mouse moves.  I could not get any device activty that way.

Then I thought I'd shoot for a basic character screen mouse using
gpm, so I installed the Debian gpm package.  I ran gpm-mouse-test
and it puts out a lot of text, but it never could tell me what my
mouse device was.

The Debian auto-configured gpm daemon is running this command:

    /usr/sbin/gpm -m /dev/input/mice -t exps2

which seems correct as far as I can tell.


Of course, lots of futzing around in the X.org config file hasn't
given me a working mouse, either.


Does anyone have an idea what would be the trick to a working
external mouse with this old laptop?

Are there any Debian specific diagnostics that might exercise my
mouse hardware directly?

I'd sure appreciate your help.


Thanks a lot,

Lester