problem with mouse in mandrake 10.0/kde 3.2

[Guest cwc]

hi,

 

so, i just recentally installed mandrake 10.0 community edition on my IBM R31 ThinkPad Notebook which i downloaded off of the internet and burned onto cds. I installed Mandrake without difficulty and everything seemed to be fine. The installation process recognized my hardware on the first try. this is my first experience with linux or mandrake and so i was quite pleased at the ease of installation.

 

i chose to go with KDE as my desktop and the version is 3.2

 

so, here's the trouble:

 

something's up with my mouse. the thinkpad has what's called a trackpoint mouse; a little red button located between the G, H and B keys and then left and right click buttons below the spacebar to substitute for a real mouse.

 

Harddrake recognizes my mouse as: "?Any PS/2 & USB mice"

 

the only thing odd here being that it says number of buttons "7" (see below) when there's only 3.

 

Number of buttons: ?7

Type: ?Universal

 

before i've installed any software except that which came with the installation cds i've seemed to run into a really annoying problem: my mouse randomly, from time to time, runs all over the screen and acts like either the right mouse button is being pushed or the left. windows close and open at will, sometimes the 'taskbar' at the bottom of the screen is moved to the right or left side and so on. it's really, really annoying. also, the problem seems to come and go. the mouse works perfectly for 5 minutes and then it goes crazy for 10 seconds and then back to normal.

 

help! i feel like this could be something minor, and it requires a driver change or something, but maybe my intuition is off in this environment i'm not familiar with.

 

any suggestions as to how to resolve this would be greatly appreciated.

 

thanks,

christopher

 

[moved from Installing Mandrake by spinynorman]

[liquidzoo]

My best guess would be to try to reconfigure your mouse, either using MCC or mousedrake (cli). Something got messed up. I'll see if I can find something from my laptop's setup if I get a chance. It has a trackpoint mouse as well that works just fune.

[Guest cwc]

thanks but i have played with the configuration in the MCC and using mousedrake and i can't seem to resolve the problem this way. i've tried switching from universal "any ps/2 & usb mice" to ps/2 "standard" but there's no difference in the result: mouse works, but then goes crazy now and then.

[Guest reducer]

I've got the same problem with a PS/2 mouse on my laptop. I guess it's a kernel issue because when I plug in my usb mouse, there is no problem anymore. But I want my PS/2 mouse working because it has a wheel (cannot live without a wheel :) ) so I'm trying to install the newer kernel I found on RPM Search (2.6.7.2) and I'll get back to tell ya if it worked or not, it won't be too soon cause I have to install video drivers too from ATI, and it's a RADEON M9, so I don't know if it will be easy or not,... let's cross fingers.

[Guest reducer]

Well, even with the latest kernel installed (2.6.7.2), my PS/2 Mices (tried several ones) keep going crazy often. So, even upgrading the kernel is no use for this issue. I give up, I just don't know how to work this problem around. Have tried to configure mices every possible way, have tried to update kernel, but now my video board isn't supported anymore cause ATI hasn't brought out a driver for that kernel (and recompilation with kernel source just fails for some strange reason...), and the mouse keeps going mad... well, this is too bad, I'll won't be able to use a mouse on my laptop with Mandrake 10, and that's not really great.

[Guest montxo]

Same happens to me. I've just installed mandrake 10, and cannot get my ps2 mouse to work. I used the configuration utilities of mandrake, and tested all kinds of mouses there and none work. Funny thing is that it works while I am installing mandrake, but refuses to work again after that. And, like the first one sais, it is detected as a mouse with 7 buttons.

 

Anybody has anything new about this issue?

 

Thanks

[Amy_Anderson]

Hello,

I have the same problem, if I plug in my ps/2 mouse, it goes crazy......If I use my usb trackball mouse it works but not the wheel. I too, have tried several different ways of configuring and it always goes to Any PS/2 & USB mice, number of buttons '7' type : universal.

 

 

This is a fresh install, 10.00

 

Any solutions yet anyone?

[Guest mcgruff]

I'm also having a problem (Mandrake 10) . My USB wacom tablet worked first time in the installer (albeit it jumped around a bit) but once I got into the GUI the cursor just flickered up and down l-hand side of screen when I tried to use the pen.

 

My PS2 mouse was even worse - no response whatsoever.

[cwchia]

I have similar promblem too. I was having MDK 9.2 and then upgraded using urpmi to MDK 10 and kernel 2.6.3-16mdk and my mouse (generic PS/2 wheel mouse) starts to give trouble. Whenever I move my mouse a bit faster (my bad habit to look for the ouse pointer, I always moves it back and forth to look for it), it then acted strangely, it will launch programmes, open opn documents re-sizing windows etc even without having press any button. Any solution please?

 

I tried to configure my mouse using mousedrake and it detects my mouse a 'any USB or PS/2 mouse. Changing it to Generic PS/2 Wheel mouse doesn't souve the problem.

 

Also is there an easy way (like by using urpmi) to roll back to the earlier kernel (2.4.x) as I strongly suspect that it is the kernel that is causing the problem.

 

TIA.

[Guest kortak]

Hi,

 

I'am having exactly the same problem as CWC and it is impossible to change the mouse in mousedrake, it always get back to the "Any PS/2 & USB mice" field after. By changing the mouse protocol with PS/2 in XF86Config-4 config file, the mouse worked but I still don't see the pointer

 

Any idea

Edited September 23, 2004 by kortak

[cwchia]

I soulved my own little problem. Prior to tweaking the driver and hardware setting I did plug in my spare mouse to no avail, that lead me to try to tweak the settings etc. After much work, I decided to try the obvious again and ran 2 blocks away to get a new mouse, it works, simple as that.

[Guest Jose3348]

 

I thing this problem is for an error compilation in kernel 2.6

If you test 2.4 in mandrake 10.0 really is ok

 

[AussieJohn]

I sometimes wonder if some of these mice are not totally mice as is the case with modems and winmodems.

I have seen a number of posts where users have had erratic mice which seemed to work ok in Windows but not in Linux but when the user has popped out and bought a more recent one, and most likely NOT a cheap one, it works perfectly in Linux straight off.

 

This is only conjecture on my part but it does seem to follow a kind of pattern.

Personally, I have always used the Logitech brand in the medium to dearer range and have never had problems in Linux except when I was trying to be too clever in setting it up rather than letting Mandrake deal with it. Mice in Mandrake is really now a no brainer. During install, if it tests OK then that is the end of it. And that is how it should be.

 

Cheers. John.

[adamw]

john: if it worked under 2.4 kernel and not under 2.6, though, that's a genuine regression that should be tested. Has anyone tried one of these mice under 10.1? Same problem? If so, could they file a Bugzilla report and have everyone who experiences the same problem vote for it?

[adamw]

BTW, there's nothing a host OS could do for an opto-mechanical (i.e., classic ball) mouse. As the name implies, they're mechanical devices; they work by actually measuring the movement of something physical, the ball. I suppose you could offload processing of the images from an optical mouse to the host OS, but I don't know of any optical mouse that actually *does* this, it's obviously trivial enough that doing so wouldn't be a cost benefit. So I doubt there's such a thing as a WinMouse :).