[lug] Dual mice under X?

[Bonnell, Doug]

Sorry to take so long to reply, yesterday was
"one of those days"!  :-)

The mouse options I mentioned are indeed all in
the BIOS. It's a Phoenix BIOS and I know that it's
been customized for DELL.

I'm going to figure out how things work with a USB
mouse, then use either gpm or multimouse since I
*think* the PS/2 touchpad is still functional with
USB mouse attached.

Regards,
Doug

-----Original Message-----
From: D. Stimits [mailto:stimits at idcomm.com]
Sent: Wednesday, July 11, 2001 5:45 PM
To: lug at lug.boulder.co.us
Subject: Re: [lug] Dual mice under X?


"Bonnell, Doug" wrote:
> 
> Well.... the options in the BIOS aren't too promising!
> 
> There is Serial Mouse, which enables an external serial
> mouse and disables the touch pad.

Is that a bios option, or just behavior you found?

> 
> There is PS/2 Mouse, which enables an external PS/2 mouse
> and disables the touch pad.

Same Q.

> 
> There is Touch Pad - PS/2 Mouse which switches between
> devices depending on whether an external PS/2 mouse is
> plugged in or not.

Same Q.

> 
> Would the BIOS really need to get involved with a serial
> mouse (from the Linux perspective, anyway)? Seems it
> wouldn't need much setup, just setserial on /dev/ttySx and
> then gpm would be able to communicate to it.

I'm thinking that as a means of making a notebook better able to plug in
to docking stations and generally other devices for temporary "full
size" support, the bios may be doing this for "convenience". That and
managing hot plugging of devices on a laptop probably is "enhanced" for
this particular scenario. I would not expect a desktop machine to do
this, although a desktop would have options in the bios whether to
activate USB or ps2 ports. The bios "convenience" features of a laptop
could conceivably get in the way of allowing the o/s to do the work.

> 
> Is there USB legacy devices, say /dev/usbmouse, available
> under the 2.4.x kernels? I'm not seeing such.

Can't answer that, not enough usb knowledge. But...the general scheme is
that most "mouse" device listings in /dev/ are just sym links to the
underlying device, whether it is a ttyS# (serial port), psaux (ps2
mouse), or something else.

D. Stimits, stimits at idcomm.com

> 
> Doug
> 
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