From this description, we pretty-much know that it
isn't an issue with Lilo or Grub: the system is booting, after all.
The first thing to review would be
/var/log/messages (whatever it's called on your system), and the output of the
dmesg command. If any glitch occurred at startup, someone logged it somewhere, and the logfile's in
/var/log.
Next, we must determine if the hardware sees the device. Again this partly depends on your system, but if you don't see a file called
/dev/input/mice there's a good chance that the device-driver support needed to control that device doesn't exist. But if you
do see it, then the problem is most likely with XWindows or XOrg.
As a way of getting out of this mess... start by booting your old kernel. Then
completely remake the new one. The way I do this is...
- mv .config foobar (so we don't lose that file when we...)
- make distclean (remove every scrap of any "old" files.)
- mv foobar .config (now put the config-file back so we can...)
- make (recompile everything...)
- make modules_install (...)
- make install (... and install it)
The key step here is
make distclean, which will ensure that absolutely all of the old files relating to the kernel
(caution! including .config!) (hence the funny-business with a file named [say...] "foobar") are removed. Thus, when you recompile the kernel,
everything is recompiled:
nothing is "residue."
If you then find that the problem persists,
make oldconfig followed by
make menuconfig (after making a backup copy of your existing
.config!)
will help you check to make sure that all of the device-support you expected to see is still there. The flag-settings in the config-file do change from one release to the next.
I always keep a backup copy, individually named, of each and every
.config file I have ever used. It's stored in a subdirectory of
/root and it's read-only. It can be very handy to be able to
diff the old and new versions of the config to determine, conclusively, exactly what has changed.
