Mouse doesn't work

[John A. Morrow, Jr.]

Recently installed RedHat 5.0 on an AMD-586 box. This PC has a VESA local bus with a VESA  integrated disk controller and I/O card. It also has a generic VESA video card based upon the Cirrus Logic CL-GD542X with 2MB video RAM. The mouse is attached to the second serial port on the I/O card because the first port is bad. The generic 3-button serial mouse works fine in MS mode in MS-DOS 6.2, WIN 95, and OS/2. It is set to COM 2, IRQ 3. COM 1 is not used because of the bad serial port on the I/O card.

Linux seems to boot normally, although all those messages fly by pretty quick and I don't understand them yet anyways. I ran the XConfigurator and X starts but the mouse cursor just stares at me from the center of the screen, daring me to make it move. I tried editing   /etc/X11/XF86Config but so far without success. The original values were

Section "Pointer"
    Protocol    "Microsoft"
    Device      "/dev/mouse"

With the above settings I could start X Windows but could only navigate with the keyboard. When I stumbled upon <CTRL><ALT><F1> to exit, I saw an error message of "Warning: /dev/mouse unable to get status of mouse fd (Input/Output error)."

I substituted ttys1 in lieu of  mouse but then X wouldn't start at all, leaving me with a "Fatal Server Error: Cannot open mouse (Input/Output error)."

Can I change gpm settings to fix this? How do I change gpm settings? What is gpm?

Thanks in advance,

John Morrow
Bellemont, AZ