ok, new to debian; had had a working mandrake system on my laptop. it got screwed up, and i decided to try debian (i had used knoppix and liked it). i then got my mandrake system working back to normal. like an idiot, i decided to change anyway. tried to install etch via floppy, without luck. after MUCH difficulty, finally got sarge installed. after more difficulty, got X installed/almost configured. having trouble now with the mouse; initially kept getting error "configured mouse: cannot open input device". tried different config combos without luck. used mdetect with output "/dev/psaux"--not sure what this did for me, except that i noticed that i don't have /dev/psaux on my system. did some web searching, realized that modules psmouse and mousedev weren't loaded. modprobe mousedev, no prob, but can't find psmouse. with mousedev loaded, x will now start, but my mouse is frozen in the middle of the screen. that's about where i'm at now. is psmouse a necessary module for this to work? if so, why didn't it install with debian? is there a way to install it after the fact, or do i now have to muck around with kernel? hardware is a thinkpad 570e, trackpoint is what i'm trying to use. iirc, this used regular ps/2 drivers in the past...

Try /dev/input/mice for your mouse. I think that is how I have the mouse configured on my Debian laptop. If that doesn't work, I'll check it tomorrow at work and post my mouse settings.

Peace,
JimBass

yeah, i tried it with /dev/input/mice and dev/input/mouse0. no luck. if i could tell whether the mouse recognition is debian-based (i feel like it is) or xfree based i'd be able to proceed better. is there a way to tell if the mouse is recognized/loaded by debian? in other words, just because i have dev/input/mouse files on my hd, does that mean that any drivers are actually installed?

looks like for whatever reason, the kernel wasn't loading the ps/2 module. upgraded to kernel 2.6.x, and everything worked fine. think i'm getting the hang of this debian thing...and since i'm a glutton, i'm in the midst of doing a dist-upgrade to etch.

had to push my luck. doing the dist-upgrade, for some reason (maybe temp files?) ran out of space on my / partition, which hopelessly screwed everything up. decided to start from square 1. installing sarge (couldn't get etch to install properly last time) with minimal packages, then dist-upgrade/kernel upgrade. we shall see...