[techtalk] dead mouse

[Conor Daly]

On Sat, Jun 23, 2001 at 10:53:21AM +0100 or so it is rumoured hereabouts, 
James A. Sutherland thought:
> On Fri, 22 Jun 2001 23:40:57 -0500, you wrote:
> 
> >David Merrill wrote:
> >> 
> >> Hi all,
> >> 
> >> My mouse suddenly died on me. Occasionally I can get it to move, but
> >> then it moves jerkily and coasts to the side of the screen. All 3
> >> buttons still work. I've tried two other meeces which both do the same
> >> thing, which afaics rules out the mouse itself.
> >> 
> >> I haven't done anything at all with any conf files.
> >> 
> >> Does anyone have any suggestions on what might be wrong, or how I
> >> might go about debugging this?
> 
> > My recollection is that the X and Y signals are
> >on two different wires,
> 
> Not to the PC they aren't - at least, not with serial, PS/2 and USB
> mice. It's just a serial stream of relative coordinates and button
> status. Acorn's proprietary mice used to do this, IIRC - what kind of
> mouse is it?
> 
> > so since the problem is mouse
> >idependent, my guess would be that the problem is on the
> >other side of the mouse/computer interface ...
> 
> I'd agree the problem is the PC side of things, but I doubt it's
> hardware. More likely to be a driver problem: you get very similar
> results if you have the wrong mouse type configured, since the driver
> then interprets the coordinates the mouse sends wrongly...
> 

I get behaviour like this using a KVM (Keyboard, Vidoe, Mouse) switch to
share inputs between three boxes.  switching from X to console and back
resets the mouse but maybe only because gpm runs for consoles and the
switch to console invokes the gpm driver and the switch back to X
reinvokes the X mouse driver (spouting nonsense now!).  I presume you
restarted X for each mouse change?

Conor
-- 
Conor Daly <conor.daly at oceanfree.net>

Domestic Sysadmin :-)
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