Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 113617
r-c-x should automatically add secondary pointer of DevInputMice
Last modified: 2007-11-30 17:07:00 EST
Description of problem: IMHO, r-c-x should always add this line to the ServerLayout section: InputDevice "DevInputMice" "AlwaysCore" If a USB mouse is specified as mouse0, it doesn't hurt. If there isn't a USB mouse attached, it still doesn't cause any harm. Can you make this the default behavior in the future? Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): All versions of r-c-x, RHEL3 and Fedora
Added internal RFE bug #114048. Will consider for future releases.
Thank you for the suggestion. It was passed along to product management, but not committed for a future release.
This is a HORRIBLE answer. The lack of this feature is something that will hurt X on RHEL. Is this problem being solved in other ways? Is anaconda going to always add a USB mouse entry, so that r-c-x doesn't need to do this on its own? Please provide some overview of this issue. Do you need a business justification to make your product better? Does Red Hat have to be pulled point by point through the "improving general quality IS a business justification" sieve? How about this... companies that find this feature in Suse Enterprise and read this bugzilla entry will be more inclined to switch away from RHEL.
I believe that the move to the 2.6 kernel will automatically fix this problem. With 2.6, both USB and PS/2 mice use /dev/input/mice. This allows for having one entry in the XF86Config file that will allow both kinds of mice to work. The situation is a little more complicated with serial mice, but these are not very common any more. You might want to test with one of the Fedora Core 2 test releases and see if this problem still exists. If it's fixed there, it will be fixed for the next version of RHEL.
Ah... the *technical* details we all long for. Thanks for the explaination and insite.