4D+ Mouse
Dan Strick
strick at covad.net
Fri Sep 9 17:23:36 PDT 2005
Fearing that 3-button mice might soon become extinct, I just bought a
bunch of cheap ones for my inventory. They were advertised as "LOGITECH"
but are labeled "Labtec". During the bootstrap configuration monologue,
the psm driver reports "psm0: model 4D+ Mouse, device ID 8".
I tried two of these mice with FreeBSD 5.4 and neither worked with moused.
The console went crazy when I moved the mouse. Moused worked a little
better if I specified the "ps/2" protocol instead of "auto", but it still
jerked the cursor around a bit anyway. I discovered that if I booted the
system with a working ps/2 mouse attached and then connected the Labtec
mouse in place of the working mouse, then the Labtec mouse worked just
fine even with the "auto" protocol.
I added this line:
hint.psm.0.flags="0x200"
to /boot/device.hints. This is the NOIDPROBE bit. It apparently tells
the psm driver to ignore whatever the mouse says about itself and assume
it is a generic ps/2 mouse. The psm driver now reports:
psm0: model Generic PS/2 mouse, device ID 0
during bootstrap and the Labtec mice seem to work ok.
I looked in the psm driver. It seems to think it knows something special
about A4 Tech 4D+ mice. I didn't study the details or even verify that
this is what it thinks my Labtec mice are.
Can someone shed some light on this problem? Is choosing an off-brand
ps/2 mouse something of a crapshoot? I never had such a problem before.
(P.S. This problem may be specific to FreeBSD. RH FC4 Linux has no
problem with the mouse. I bet that MS windows doesn't either. Does this
count as a bug in the FreeBSD 5.4 psm driver or is it just a fact of life?)
Dan Strick
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