mouse pointer frozen at boot with puppy 2.17

sirius57 · 01-28-2008, 11:55 AM

I have had great success with puppy on several computers from laptops to desktops, even ones without hard drives installed, however, on one desktop, the mouse pointer stayed frozen in place. I had to reboot by using the keyboard. The box is a pentium 1 166mhz and 64meg ram. The mouse is a ps/2 type but it plugs into the serial 9 pin port with an adapter. I can not figure out if it is a mouse compatability problem or a ram problem. If it is ram, I was hoping it would create a swap file on the hard drive.

oldun · 01-31-2008, 12:18 PM

Puppy 217 needs a USB mouse, or a ps2 mouse connected by a ps2/usb adaptor into a USB port. I used a ps2 with Puppy 216, and now with Puppy 214R. 301 needs a usb mouse.

It's to do with the version of Linux Kernel that's being used- ps2 support was dropped.

Gerry

sirius57 · 02-02-2008, 10:06 PM

Is there a way to determine which older version of puppy would support my hardware? I checked the puppy site and could not locate any info on mice. I tried damn small linux and the mouse worked, but the screen looked jagged. I think the horrible screen might be due to only having one setting for the screen refresh in dsl.

oldun · 02-03-2008, 05:51 AM

First: Puppy 214R. This is an old Puppy, Puppy 2.14, revisited. Updated with new features, and other improvements. If you need CUPS to set up your printer, then you need to add it. Default printer manager is XPDQ.

Second: Puppy 301-Retro. Puppy 301 is the latest official release, this version is the same thing using an older kernel. Includes CUPS.

I mostly use 214R.

Oldun

sirius57 · 02-03-2008, 07:11 PM

The mouse now works. I used the puppy 3.01 retro and it worked very well. When I used the alsa sound wizard to set up sound, it warned me that probing a legacy isa sound card could make the system unstable. I declined the probe since I was not sure how 'unstable' the system would become. Is that just a standard warning or should I use a pci sound card?

oldun · 02-04-2008, 03:56 PM

I don't know whether they mean it or not... I declined to try, too. But I also have (news to me!) two or three other sound cards, one of which configured nicely.

If the legacy hardware is all you have, then you are a bit stuck.

Oldun

sirius57 · 02-05-2008, 08:18 PM

Nothing to worry about. The probing took about 10 minutes to find the driver and test for sound. I don't recommend answering yes to the option in alsaconfig to check for every possible irq and address unless you want to wait a long time for a response. Overall I am very pleased with puppy on this old box. The box only has 64 meg ram so puppy ran as a live cd and accessed the cd when it needed to. I had puppy save the .sfs files and the personal config file to the hard drive to free up ram space and make booting faster.