Mouse (psm0) sometimes not working
Phil Schulz
ph.schulz at gmx.de
Fri Mar 12 16:09:49 PST 2004
Hello List!
I have a problem with my mouse which I can't figure out by myself. I
hope any of you guys can help me. I tried to include as much information
as possible so this eMail is rather long...
Let me first describe my setup a bit as I think it might be related to
my problems. I have two computers sitting here, both are connected to
the same keyboard, mouse and monitor through one of those KVM switches.
The mouse is a Logitech MouseMan Dual Optical. The mouse has a cord and
allows for USB and for PS/2 use (adaptor). My mouse is connected as a
PS/2 mouse using the adaptor. It is recognized as
psm0: <PS/2 Mouse> flags 0x100 irq 12 on atkbdc0
psm0: model IntelliMouse, device ID 3
The first PC is running FreeBSD 4-Stable as a desktop as well as
Windows 2000 (mostly to play games). The other one currently runs
FreeBSD 4-Stable and is mainly for testing and playing around with and
does not run moused(8) nor does it run X. The FreeBSD desktop runs
XFree86 4.x.x (the one that comes w/ 4.9-Release) and moused(8). The
following lines in /etc/rc.conf are used to start moused(8):
moused_enable="YES"
moused_port="/dev/psm0"
moused_type="auto"
Now, the problem: When I boot FreeBSD and run X (which I always do,
it's a desktop system), the mouse very often does not respond at all.
Sometimes this is fixed by rebooting the machine. However, sometimes the
problem remains after several reboots. Also, Windows sometimes does not
recognize the mouse any more, which is really strange to me. I then need
to either switch off the PC's PSU or, in case that didn't help, I have
to boot windows in 'fail safe mode' or whatever it's called in English .
Other times, time is on my side and after trying to boot FreeBSD after
an hour or so, it will work again without me doing anything.
These are things I noticed in such situations: When switching to the
first console via <ctrl><alt>+<f1>, I don't see any error messages (I
probably just don't see them; doesn't mean they're not there). When I
log in and check which processes are running, I find moused(8) not
running. I am then unable to start moused(8) manually. Many times it
complains about an I/O error for /dev/psm0. It happend once (I think)
that /dev/psm0 was not there at all. Remaking it via
cd /dev && sh MAKEDEV psm0
made the device file, but did not make moused(8) work. Also, I saw (only
one time) a message during booting which looked like
kernel: psm0: failed to open the device (doopen)
but grep(1)'ing through /usr/src/sys did not give me any results where
this could come from. This is what I've seen from the software side, but
hardware shows some more symptoms: The mouse has got two optical sensors
which are usually dimmed while the mouse is not being moved and will be
lit as soon as I move the mouse. However, when the fault occurs, the
LEDs are constantly blinking brightly but will return to their normal
behaviour when switching (using the KVM switch) from one PC to the other
(if that one doesn't show the problem at the time).
I've done some googling prior to this post and found many problem
reports about users who have problems with their mouse when connecting
via a KVM switch. However, this problem I'm facing also occurs when I do
not connect through the switch but also when I connect the mouse
directly to the port. It has not occured when connecting the mouse to
the USB port. I have trouble solving this issue by myself because my
knowledge about the hardware involved is very limited and I haven't
found any way to reliably reproduce the problem (other than booting the
system). I hope that there is somebody out there who can either tell me
how to fix this or at least explain why this problem exists and why
there isn't any way of fixing this...
Phil.
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