HOWTO : Setting Up a mouse + wheel on a traditional ps/2 port in FBSD 5.3

Ted Mittelstaedt tedm at toybox.placo.com
Mon Feb 28 12:40:38 GMT 2005



> -----Original Message-----
> From: Valery [mailto:valery at vslash.com]
> Sent: Monday, February 28, 2005 4:24 AM
> To: Ted Mittelstaedt
> Cc: freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
> Subject: Re: HOWTO : Setting Up a mouse + wheel on a traditional ps/2
> port in FBSD 5.3
>
>
> Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:
>
> > Hey Valery, a few things on this:
> >
> > This only works for mice that support the intellimouse protocol.
> >
> > Simplest way to find out if your mouse supports this is to kill
> > the moused daemon, then issue the command:
> >
> > moused -p /dev/psm0 -t auto -d -f
> >
>
> All right, this explain a lot of mis-understand things i found
> on the net (same parms working for one and not for others)
>
> > You should NEVER set the protocol for the mouse in either Xfree86 or
> > xorg to anything other than sysmouse, when using FreeBSD.  And, if
> > your going to run X you should -always- run moused.
> >
> Ok, that's what i found. But, why X choose ps/2 when "Protocol"
> is set to "Auto" ?

"auto" instructs the mouse daemon that when it sees a ps/2 port to use
the ps/2 protocol, when it sees a serial port to probe for that, when
it sees a usb port to setup for usb protocol.

It is preferable particularly in a doc like this because it applies
universally.

> I'm afraid that informations about "Protocol" "sysmouse" are very
> difficult to find. I did not on my side, not even on the net nor
> on the FreeBSD or X documentations.
>

You don't need to worry about it.  Any problems between moused and
X's support for the sysmouse protocol are something an ordinary user
probably will never see.  This can be ignored as the problem of the
moused authors and X authors.

What an ordinary user needs to be concerned with is if moused is
correctly talking to their rodent.

> > Note - many wheel mice use a push on the wheel as a second button.
>
> Thank
>
> > I don't understand how your X server got:
> >
> >>  My X.log whith the 'sysmouse' protocol :
> >>	(**) Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
> >>	(**) Mouse0: ZAxisMapping: buttons 4 and 5
> >
> > when you had configured
> >
> >  	  Option		"ZAxisMapping" "X"
> >
> > If I knew I could probably tell you why rebooting worked.
>
> Sorry, it was the previous version of my log file.
> (always difficult to write a summary with a lot of pieces)
> Perhaps a mobo pb., or a forgot of mine, no matter to worry about that.
> I'm sometimes "Aemnesiac" too ... :o)
>
> Many thanks Ted for your tips. i hope that the whole thing will be
> interesting for others, sheding a light on this stuff.
>
> Just a little thing - to be clean - i found after posting :
> 2. Parameters
>   /etc/X11/xorg.conf :
>      Section "InputDevice"
>        # All parms according to previous posts and ...
>        Option      "Emulate3Buttons" "Off"

It's off whenever more than 2 buttons are detected - a wheel mouse always
has more than 2 - but this might prevent a useless error message in the
log

Ted

>      EndSection
>
> Regards,
>
> v/
>



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