problem with mouse on ancient Compaq laptop

Hi,

I have a Compaq LTE5300 laptop, circa 1998, and I am running etch on it. I've run various flavors of Debian on it off and on over the years, but I haven't used it regularly. [That wouldn't be much fun at all...]

The machine has a Pentium 133 processor, 80MB (max) of RAM, and a PCMCIA network card. No CD-ROM, so I boot from floppies and do a network install. After eight to ten hours, it's done. :-)

X.org comes up with some minor screen errors along the left and top edges, but generally usable. But after much horsing around, I still can't get the mouse working. This laptop has a flakey trackpoint/eraser mouse that hardly ever works, and when it does it "drifts" across the screen, so I always use an external, plain, three button mouse plugged into the external PS/2 port.

I started worrying that the external mouse was just broken, or the external mouse controller hardware/port had died, so I ran PC Check diagnostics from floppy and verified that the external mouse hardware works fine. The BIOS is very simple and has no concept of switching mice from trackpoint to external port.

In the dmesg log, I see:

    PNP: PS/2 Controller [PNP0303,PNP0f13] at 0x60,0x64 irq 1,12     serio: i8042 KBD port at 0x60,0x64 irq 1     mice: PS/2 mouse device common for all mice

Do you need help?

In addition to our free technical library, Pantek provides professional IT services to companies who utilize Open Source software: Learn more about Pantek's Technical Support offerings Place an order for 24/7/365 Technical Support here Learn more about Pantek, who we are, and what we do Chat with a Live Operator Related lists.debian.org Links debian-announce debian-apache debian-arm-changes debian-beowulf debian-boot debian-cd debian-cd-vendors debian-changes debian-changes-digest debian-isp debian-kde debian-laptop debian-mirrors-announce debian-news debian-security debian-security-announce debian-testing debian-user debian-user-digest Request more information about Pantek

so some mouse hardware is detected on the PS/2 hardware, though I guess not necessarily the external mouse.

I tried a simple test I read on the web about cat'ing /dev/mouse, /dev/psaux, and /dev/input/mice and seeing what shows garbage when the mouse moves. I could not get any device activty that way.

Then I thought I'd shoot for a basic character screen mouse using gpm, so I installed the Debian gpm package. I ran gpm-mouse-test and it puts out a lot of text, but it never could tell me what my mouse device was.

The Debian auto-configured gpm daemon is running this command:

    /usr/sbin/gpm -m /dev/input/mice -t exps2

which seems correct as far as I can tell.

Of course, lots of futzing around in the X.org config file hasn't given me a working mouse, either.

Does anyone have an idea what would be the trick to a working external mouse with this old laptop?

Do you need more help?

In addition to our free technical library, Pantek provides professional IT services to companies who utilize Open Source software: Learn more about Pantek's Technical Support offerings Place an order for 24/7/365 Technical Support here Learn more about Pantek, who we are, and what we do Chat with a Live Operator Related lists.debian.org Links debian-announce debian-apache debian-arm-changes debian-beowulf debian-boot debian-cd debian-cd-vendors debian-changes debian-changes-digest debian-isp debian-kde debian-laptop debian-mirrors-announce debian-news debian-security debian-security-announce debian-testing debian-user debian-user-digest Request more information about Pantek

Are there any Debian specific diagnostics that might exercise my mouse hardware directly?

I'd sure appreciate your help.

Thanks a lot,

Lester

-- 
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-REQUEST@lists.debian.org 
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmaster@lists.debian.org