Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 51419
PS/2 wheelmice might not be made by Microsoft
Last modified: 2007-03-26 23:47:51 EDT
I have a PS/2 wheelmouse from Logitech. When rerunning mouseconfig recently, I thought I couldn't find any appropriate entry for it. After digging a bit I realised I should have choosen "Microsoft IntelliMouse (PS/2)" to get the correct values in /etc/sysconfig/mouse and /etc/X11/XF86Config*. From bug report 31111 I realise I'm not the only one who have misunderstood the menu. Maybe a more generic description of the mouse type would help. "Generic IntelliMouse (PS/2)" perhaps, or maybe "IntelliMouse wheelmouse (PS/2)"?
There does seem to be some confusion with respect to mouse configuration indeed. One particular peoblem I've noticed is the confusion between the "brand" of mouse a person has, and the "protocol" that mouse uses in XFree86 and gpm. There are many different protocols various mice use to communicate with the computer. Every mouse has a favoured protocol that the vendor has developed it to use as the default, and in addition to that, many mice support other common mouse protocols also, so as to have better compatibility. Mice running under XFree86 and gpm are configured based on the protocol that they use, and not on the company who made the mouse. For example, most Logitech mice natively speak one of the logitech mouse protocols, however they also speak one or more of the microsoft mouse protocols as well. It is often possible to configure a logitech mouse to use one of several protocols. It does however look a bit odd to an end user to tell X they're using an Intellimouse PS/2 (IMPS/2) which is a Microsoft mouse, when in fact they're using a Logitech USB mouse. The thing is, that Logitech mouse is using the IMPS/2 _protocol_ to communicate with the computer, and that is what is being configured, rather than the make/model. I've found that most mice nowadays will use the IMPS2 protocol, and work better generally if configured to use that protocol. Our utilities should probably be updated to reflect the current types of hardware on the market, and use defaults that are most likely to work for a given type of mouse. Since we do not have every piece of hardware out there however, we rely on users bug reports and their solutions in order to set up most of our default settings for stuff like this. Just thought I'd add this blurb to the report as I stumbled across it.
I have just completed a text mode interface for redhat-config-mouse, which means that mouseconfig will be deprecated in the next release of Red Hat Linux. Therefore, I will not be putting any development time towards fixing mouseconfig bugs, so I'm closing this as 'wontfix'.
Understood. No point working with a dying tool. My intention was to confirm this by closing the bug. But it seems this is no longer possible for me as a reporter. (The documentation page, https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/bug_status.cgi, still says it should have been thoug.)
Changed to 'CLOSED' state since 'RESOLVED' has been deprecated.