Re: Re^2: How do I get GATEWAY2000 PS/2 mouse to work ? (fwd)

[Gilbert Ramirez Jr.]

As Susan G. Kleinmann said:
 
 My experience is that there are a couple of good hardware reasons for 
 getting serial mice instead of PS/2 mice:

 -- removing the PS/2 mouse frees up an IRQ.

Perhaps I am wrong, but a serial mouse also requires an IRQ... and a serial
port! With my PS/2 mouse I don't waste a serial port, so I can easily have a
modem and a dumb terminal connected to my computer.

Or is there a way to share IRQ's between a serial device and a serial mouse
on the same port?
 
 Cheers,
 Susan Kleinmann
 

--gilbert

__
Gilbert Ramirez Jr. [EMAIL PROTECTED]
University of Texas http://merece.uthscsa.edu/gram
Health Science Center at San AntonioUniversity Health System

Re^2: How do I get GATEWAY2000 PS/2 mouse to work ? (fwd)

[Susan G. Kleinmann]

 On Thu, 8 Aug 1996, Mike Taylor wrote:
 Lots of people seem to have problems getting PS2 mice up.  My Gateway +
 PS2 worked fine under Slackware 3.0, but I still can't get it to work
 under Debian.  I have tried all the stuff that you tried plus
 compiling a custom kernel (with the Debian source package) but no dice.
 My (admittedly cowardly) solution: cheap serial mouse.

My experience is that there are a couple of good hardware reasons for 
getting serial mice instead of PS/2 mice:
-- we accidentally fried a BIOS chip by delivering a static charge through 
   a PS/2 mouse.  This has never happened with a serial mouse,
   and leads me to suspect that the PS/2 connector (or at least the connector 
   we used to have on our R.I.P. Asus '486 motherboard) is less robust against 
   static than an serial connector.
-- removing the PS/2 mouse frees up an IRQ.
-- one never knows if/when PS/2 mouse is going to be available in a 
   downloaded kernel, whereas serial support is virtually always there.

I have had some problems with some serial mice though, particularly those
cheap ones which change their state when the power goes off.

Cheers,
Susan Kleinmann

Re: Re^2: How do I get GATEWAY2000 PS/2 mouse to work ? (fwd)

[Mark Eichin]

on the other hand, most laptops with builtin mouse or trackball or
force stick or glidepoint seem to use the PS/2 interface... which is
an argument (polite request :-) for having it in the default kernel.
Can't free up the IRQ in that case either...