Package: kernel-image-2.6.8-2-386 Version: 2.6.8-15 Severity: important
For all kernels more recent than 2.6.6-2-386, one of my machines (quite an old ALi M1541-based one) treats all mouse movement as random noise when my Intellimouse Explorer 3.0 is connected to my machine through my I/O Gear CS-182 "MiniView Plus" KVM (keyboard/video/mouse) switch - any mouse motion produces pointer motion all over the screen (both under gpm/curses and X) and all kinds of button clicks - selects, pastes, etc. Completely unusable. The problem is not present if I connect the mouse directly to the computer, nor did it ever manifest under kernel 2.4. It also doesn't seem to be an issue for the other machine on the switch, which is a more recent nForce2-based box running kernel 2.6.9-2-k7. This problem has been reported extensively elsewhere on kernel.org and in discussion fora for other distributions, so feel free to ignore - my main reason for writing is that after some experimentation (since I now need a more bleeding-edge kernel than 2.6.6) I seem to have a fairly trivial hack to work around the problem and since I've not seen it documented elsewhere I thought it'd be worth writing down. Firstly, although I've not seen this written down anywhere, it seems to me that the problem actually seems to come in two forms: the first form is where people encounter problems (loss of synchronisation, chaotic pointer movement etc.) whenever they switch using the KVM; the second form is a complete failure to initialise - i.e. the mouse/pointer seems to be messed up from the moment the machine boots. My workaround is for the second form - problems from boot time - and consists of repeatedly reloading psmouse with increasing levels of protocol support before starting the display manager - most easily accomplished by creating something like /etc/rc2.d/S14psmouse-restart (for example) as follows: #!/bin/sh rmmod psmouse modprobe psmouse proto=imps rmmod psmouse modprobe psmouse proto=exps Missing either stage of this incremental approach to loading psmouse will leave me with the original problem (so suggestions along the lines of adding kernel boot parameters "psmouse.proto=bare" don't work for me). I don't pretend to understand what's going on, I'll just say that this works for me and hope that it might provide some insight into what's happening for someone who does understand, and in the meantime possibly help others get the full feature set from their mouse... Conrad -- System Information: Debian Release: 3.1 APT prefers unstable APT policy: (900, 'unstable') Architecture: i386 (i586) Kernel: Linux 2.6.8-2-386 Locale: LANG=en_GB, LC_CTYPE=en_GB (charmap=ISO-8859-1) Versions of packages kernel-image-2.6.8-2-386 depends on: ii coreutils [fileutils] 5.2.1-2 The GNU core utilities ii fileutils 5.2.1-2 The GNU file management utilities ii initrd-tools 0.1.77 tools to create initrd image for p ii module-init-tools 3.2-pre1-2 tools for managing Linux kernel mo -- no debconf information -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]