Mouse Settings

[Andrewski]

Hi, I'm in my first day of Mandrake! Yay. Pretty exciting, really.

 

I'm just kind of tinkering around (now that I figured out how to play a CD, thanks to the FAQs here... I think so anyway :)) and I'm trying to make my mouse move more quickly. I can't seem to find any mouse tracking settings in the Control Center; do they exist?

 

I'll be asking frequent questions here, just to warn you. :P

[Steve Scrimpshire]

They should be somewhere in KDE Control Center or Gnome Configuration (neither are the same as Mandrake Control Center). I tried speeding up my mouse because it is slower in Linux than in Windows, but something about it is odd to me. Almost like it doesn't stop exactly where I where I want it or there's a millisecond pause before it starts moving something. Hard to explain, but basically, I just learned to live with it being slower.

[mikeoneil]

but something about it is odd to me. Almost like it doesn't stop exactly where I where I want

 

My mouse is the same, it's almost okay, but there is some subtle difference to it's behaviour in Win98 that I can't quite explain. It's almost as if it doesn't quite stop exactly when I want it to. As Steve said it's perhaps only a few milliseconds delay, but often causes me to move backwards and forwards a couple of times to select something small on the screen (xmms controls for example). I can live with it, but apart from the KDE (which I use by the way) control settings and xconfig file are there any other things that can be adjusted for the mouse? What about settings at a lower level such as the driver?

 

Mike

[bvc]

Try

Option "Resolution" "400"

in your /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 (InputDevice/mouse settings), trying different values. Granted, if you're using kde or gnome you don't need this, but if not, mouse settings can be done in the X config and/or with xset (part of the X11R6-contrib rpm).

[mikeoneil]

The "Resolution" didn't seem to change things, though increasing the threshold has improved the accuracy for slow movements with acceleration set to 2.

The mouse, as I mentioned, seems to stutter as I move it, very slightly, enough to be annoying but not critical.

I assume the mouse is handled by X windows and it's almost as if it there is a few milliseconds delay switching tasks when I move the mouse. With this in mind I increased the priority of the X process (temporarily with KSysGuard). I tried setting the Nice value for the X process to -2 from 0 so increasing it's priority (almost every other task has nice 0). In my opinion it seems smoohter now.

If I left priority of the X process higher than the others would I cause any other problems? I rarely use anything approching 100% CPU even playing DVDs only uses max 25%.

If I am not doing something really stupid, how can I make this priority permanent?

Edited: Forgot to mention, I boot to a console then type startx to launch KDE.

Mike.

[bvc]

how can I make this priority permanent?

here;

http://www.mandrakeusers.org/viewtopic.php?t=5692

http://members.optusnet.com.au/ckolivas/kernel/#faq

Renicing X? Many distributions (eg Mandrake) start X by default at a nice of -10 to make it more responsive. This is a workaround for the old scheduler limitations and the new scheduler makes this unecessary, and may actually promote audio skipping with this kernel. Each distribution may do this at different places but commonly in the file /usr/lib/X11/xdm/Xservers there will be a line that looks like this: 

 

:0 local /bin/nice -n -10 /usr/X11R6/bin/X -deferglyphs 16 

 

change it to: 

 

:0 local /usr/X11R6/bin/X -deferglyphs 16

[mikeoneil]

Thanks bvc, I'll look for this line this evening. In general, is it a good idea or not to increase the priority of X? With it set to -2, I did not notice any skipping with xmms nor any problem with mplayer dvd playback, so answering my own question, I guess if it seems to work I should try it!

Mike

[bvc]

I don't see that -2 is gonna hurt anything, especially if mandrake's default is -10.