Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 68656
Mouse Becomes Nonfunctional In Sony Vaio Laptop Installs If 2 Pointing Devices Installed
Last modified: 2007-04-18 12:44:06 EDT
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:0.9.9) Gecko/20020513 Description of problem: When installing Limbo to a Sony Vaio PCG-F350 laptop computer which has both a Microsoft 3-button Mouse connected to the PS/2 port and the OEM touchpad mouse (the ALPS Glidepoint), the mouse becomes nonfunctional. If you touch the Microsoft Mouse to move the mouse pointer, the mouse arrow "goes crazy" and disappears to the top or top right edge of the laptop's display. It will zoom across the top edge of the display if you move the mouse, then "park" in the top right edge of the display where it is barely visible and becomes totally unusable. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.Install Limbo to Sony Vaio PCG-F350 computer which has a 3-button Microsoft Mouse connected to the PS/2 port. This model of Vaio also has an ALPS Glidepoint touchpad mouse. 2.At the first graphical screen attempt to move the mouse arrow using the Microsoft Mouse. 3.The mouse arrow immediately behaves as described above. Actual Results: The mouse arrow is rendered unusable. The Microsoft Mouse cannot be used as a pointing device and one cannot click with it. The mouse arrow cannot be manipulated with the ALPS Glidepoint touchpad, either. Expected Results: One of the two pointing devices on the laptop should have been usable. Additional info: I've always felt that Anaconda should prompt the user for which pointing device it should "pay attention to" on a laptop system.An even better approach is to do a hardware probe on the PS/2 or USB ports or otherwise check the existing installed operating system, if any, to determine which pointing device seems to be preferred by the user. For example, it can't be that hard to inspect /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 in an existing Red Hat System to determine what the corepointer is. Or just hardware probe to see if a "real" mouse is connected to the laptop.
Is that a wheel mouse? Do both mice work properly if you change the mouse driver to two button PS/2?
Yes there is a wheel between the left and right Microsoft mouse buttons. Let me check into the 2-button mouse assignment and report back. Thanks!
Created attachment 65204 [details] XF86Config file generated by Anaconda when Limbo installed.
Created attachment 65205 [details] from /etc/sysconfig/mouse
Created attachment 65206 [details] /etc/X11/XF86Config file which currently allows me to use the 3-button mouse.
How do I tell XF86Config that I want a 2-button PS/2 driver so I can answer Warren's question? I'll try to research this more. In the mean time I would like to attach some files. The first one is XF86Config.original. This is the original XF86Config file generated by Anaconda when I installed Limbo on this machine. The second file is mouse. It was copied from /etc/sysconfig/mouse on this machine. The 3rd file is XF86Config.works. This is the XF86Config file that allows me to use the 3-button Microsoft Mouse. This file actually has it's origins in the Skipjack beta when I couldn't get the mouse to work under KDE on Skipjack either. I posted a query to Skipjack-list and someone else with a similar machine suggested I use the parameters you see here.
Try backing up your XF86Config file, then run mouseconfig. That will allow you to choose your mouse driver.
Thanks for pointing me to mouseconfig. I did as suggested, selecting "GenericPS/2" with the "Emulate 3 buttons" option turned on. This change didn't update XF86Config (I diffed it against the backup to be sure there were no changes). It updated /etc/sysconfig/mouse, apparently. Perhaps other files as well? Anyhow I restarted the machine because I'm also having a problem with X taking a really long time to come up. It sometimes displays a gray screen with no windows and a mouse pointer in the shape of an X, and stays frozen in that state until, apparently, I move the Microsoft Mouse. After running mouseconfig and restarting, the screen went gray...then turned black...then turned gray again and flickered briefly...then the KDE login screen finally came up. I attempted to use the laptop's touchpad at this point, to move the insertion point to the "password" line in the login window. As soon as the mouse arrow got near any edge of the login window, it shot back to the bottom of the display screen. I could move the arrow around with the touchpad but couldn't use it within the login window. I had full use of the Microsoft Mouse, however, and could move the insertion point..click...etc. By the way, mouseconfig has a really awful looking appearance. The fonts are just terrible and lines of text don't display clearly. Also, I had earlier used redhat-config-mouse and it crashed with python errors. I'm too tired to post bugs at this point, but will check into it tomorrow.
If I understand this correctly - you have two ps/2 mouse devices and they both need to use IMP/2 instead of PS/2 as the protocol?
Nope... that's what I thought too, until a fresh re-install of Limbo2 where I chose "Generic 2-Button Mouse PS2, emulate 3". Now it seems to be properly using PS/2 + emulate 3 on my touchpad (IMPS/2 *doesn't work for the touchpad normally), while automatically adding the USB IMPS/2 mouse that works great dynamically hotplugging just like it should in XFree86 4.2.0. I have a Sony Vaio FXA36 Athlon laptop with its PS/2 2-button touchpad, and a Logitech USB wheel mouse. I remember mouseconfig was unable to change the XF86Config file to this config the last time I installed Limbo2 where I chose USB mouse. That time the PS/2 touchpad completely disabled itself, and no amount of fiddling with redhat-config-xfree86 --reconfig or mouseconfig would bring it back. Does only Anaconda implicitly add the USB mouse by default like the RELEASE-NOTES says it should, and not redhat-config-xfree86 --reconfig or mousconfig?
Glad to hear anaconda is working. I'll reassign to redhat-config-xfree86 to answer your last question.
redhat-config-xfree86 --reconfig does add a usb mouse with AlwaysCore, unless the main mouse is usb. I'm not sure what else I'm supposed to comment on in this bug?
Warren, do you consider this issue fixed? I'm not quite sure what the next step is here?
I *think* this was working properly in RH8.0 for additional USB mice, but with Bug 80359 I can't test it properly in Phoebe. I think cochranb's original issue was with an additional PS/2 mouse instead, and the wrong PS/2 mouse protocol being chosen. He would have to comment on whether this is fixed in Phoebe or not (although watch out for Bug 80309 before testing.)
Well, I guess if we haven't heard from cochranb by this point, I'm guessing that he hasn't had time to test with Phoebe. The two bugs that you pointed to in your last post have since been fixed. I'm going to close this report as 'Rawhide' at this point. I don't have a Sony VAIO to test it myself, unfortunately. Anybody feel free to reopen this report if there are still problems with mice on VAIO systems.