[lug] mouse going crazy in linux

[David Morris]

On Mon, Feb 05, 2007 at 09:41:25PM -0600, Hugh Brown wrote:
> karl horlen wrote:
> >I recently installed a system with a 2.6.9-42 kernel
> >on it.  It's working great except for one quirky
> >thing.  The mouse doesn't seem to work properly.  
> >
> >The minute you move the mouse, whether in a console or
> >X, a message gets spit out:
> >
> >psmouse.c Wheel Mouse @isa0060/serial/input0 lost
> >synchronization throwing 2 bytes away.
> >
> >If you're on a console you can recover from it fairly
> >easy.  If you're in X it starts firing off random
> >clicks and X is unusable.  

Try experimenting with different drivers.  On my current
system I tried *all* available mouse drivers and not a
single one worked.  I then set the driver to "auto" and it
worked perfectly.

The first thing I would do is find out what application
provides mouse support on the console and disable it.  I
rarely use the mouse (even in X), so I can't tell you what
it is, but once you find it just type:

    /etc/init.d/(appname) stop

This will allow you to eliminate console interaction
problems and debug the X mouse problem.

Once you have X fixed, restart the application providing
mouse support on the console, find that application's
configuration tool, and try its drivers.

If you want to stop X, find the desktop manager currently
running (probably kdm or gdm) and use the same command as
above from a console login. (e.g. /etc/init.d/gdm stop).

Two other things to try:

Plug the mouse directly into the PC, as others noted the KVM
might cause problems.

Try a newer kernel.  2.6.9 is quite old.

--David