Hallelujah! Well, there's good news and a funny/sad story. Now I understand why friends of mine said I probably knew enough about Linux to be dangerous.
I am sending it all back to the list so the info will be searchable in the archives. The good news is that several people wrote me to tell me to make a symlink to /dev/psaux by doing 'ln -s /dev/psaux /dev/mouse' and that worked. Thanks to everyone who responded! The bad news is the last thing I had done before typing that was to change the mouse setting in xf86config to 'Microsoft' instead of PS/2. That made the mouse pointer behaves unpredictably when X finally started. Further bad news comes in the form of settings I made at install time, telling it I wanted a graphical login screen, and the fact that the window manager I installed (Window Maker) doesn't understand keystrokes to move around the screen. The icing on the cake was that, knowing I was not planning to dual-boot, I eliminated the number of seconds LILO waits before starting to boot. So on boot, I got a graphical login screen, and could log in, but it goes directly to x-windows, where my Window Maker doesn't seem to understand any keyboard commands, and my mouse pointer zips up to the upper left corner of the screen and stays there. I couldn't do anything. I couldn't even exit X to reboot! I had to shut it down dirty. Since I am at work, I didn't have my rescue floppy handy, so I went and made a copy of tomsrtbt (http://www.toms.net/rb/), and while it was booting, I looked up how to mount my hard drive. When I mounted it, mount warned me that I ought to run e2fsck. When I ran e2fsck, it gave me a warning that running it on a mounted filesystem might cause severe damage! This left me in a quandary. Should I access the drive while it was dirty? Or risk the damage? Fortunately I finally realized that what e2fsck meant for me to do was unmount the drive, then run e2fsck, then remount it. I did so, and edited my XF86Config to put the right mouse (PS/2) back in. After the reboot, I could use the mouse to exit xwindows! Next problem was getting rid of the graphical login screen I had specified prematurely, xdm. After searching around on the net and on my hard drive I determined what I needed to do was '/usr/sbin/update-rc.d -f xdm remove'. Finally X was working, but only in 640x480. My laptop is capable of 800x600 resolution, so I went and found someone with the same laptop as I (http://www.raster.com/950n/) who had posted their XF86Config. I copied it into /etc/X11/, but starting X only resulted in a message saying that font 'fixed' could not be found. Comparing the two files, I noticed that the donor file had only one line of 'FontPath "unix/:-1"' but the working (at low res) file had about 12 such lines each with specific font names. I cut and pasted in the specific font names, removed the 'unix/:-1' line, and tried again, and now it works. The most important lesson I learned is don't install xdm until you know X is solid, if ever! Thanks again to those who helped! And if anyone needs to get potato running on an old AST laptop, I know more than I used to about the process. Chris Owens -----Original Message----- From: Owens, Christopher [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Monday, January 28, 2002 1:38 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Stupid newbie question: eraserhead-style mouse Kind people, This is my first question to the list, and it is the first time I have tried to install linux since the kernel was version 1.2. I have installed potato on an old laptop using http. The laptop is an AST Ascentia 950n, and claims to have a P120, 16MB of RAM, and I have upgraded the hard drive to a 5.7GB unit. I have net thanks to a PCMCIA network card. I think when I installed, I may have had the built-in mouse disabled. When I try to start X now, I get an error that it can't open /dev/mouse, and, indeed, there does not seem to be any /dev/mouse. X has never successfully run on this system. Microsoft Mouse Driver version 8.20 works on a DOS boot floppy I have handy, and the mouse is usable. How can I get a /dev/mouse? Thanks for any help. Chris Owens -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
