Hi,

I have just upgraded an older computer with a two button serial mouse to Slackware 12.0 and have come across the problem of getting the serial mouse to be recognised and activated correctly at boot time.

The problem is summarised here.
http://support.zenwalk.org/index.php/topic,4647.0.html

As a quick hack I have added some lines to my rc.local
[code]
gpm -k
rm /dev/mouse
ln -s /dev/ttyS0 /dev/mouse
gpm -m /dev/mouse -t bare
[code]

An alternative solution suggested in the above link is to edit /etc/udev/devices/50-udev.rules and add a symlink in /lib/udev/devices.

Can somebody suggest another more elegant solution?

That would be the elegant solution -to get udev to do the right thing for your system. Since so few machines use a serial mouse any more, udev probably sets a default of PS/2.

Thanks for the the reply gnashley.

This particular box acts as a lightly trafficked firewall/gateway/router to a small intranet, so most of the time it just sits with no user interaction. But occasionally there is a need for some administration and using the mouse saves keystrokes and errors.

My second box uses a serial mouse (PII-233MHz)

Hi,

Why don't you use ssh? I do maintenance all the time with ssh using the local machine with a terminal and mouse. The servers are maintainable that way. Any local work I will still use a console to perform the tasks. I just can't see the reason to waste the monitor, kybd & mouse to just lay around. Even with a KVM, I just see a waste.

The actual setup that I administer looks like this.

----------------------Corporate LAN-------------------
......||......................||....................||
Server1 in Room A.........Server2 in Room B........Server3 in Room B
.|..........|...............|..........|.............|.........|
Clients....Clients........Clients....Clients.......Clients....Client
.I/F1.......I/F2...........I/F1.......I/F2..........I/F1.......RS232
Servers 1 and 2 are PentiumMMX boxes that were declared redundant when our corporate network environment was upgraded from a Windows NT environment. Server 3 is a more recent purchase for backup purposes.

The clients are connected to scientific instruments and range through DOS6.2, Win3.11, Win95, Win98, WinNT, Win2K and WinXP.

The servers run Samba for serving files, CUPS for shared printing and IPtables for firewall. The firewall is mostly for keeping out corporate remote administration tools that used to cause problems as well as malware from laptops that get connected to the corporate LAN. (Two mass mailing bot infections in three weeks caused me a lot of grief before I set this up.)

Our major instrument vendor would like to sell us a a sophisticated software solution running on top of Windows Server, but I find that the Slackware solution works reliably and handles all the mix of cabling requirements.

--

onebuck,
I take your point about ssh and I do have it in place and make use of it, but if I had not made use of the old boxes they would have gone to landfill years ago. Having extra hardware around provides redundancy for my setup.

gnashley,
PII233MHz, hmm. Thats my midrange server. The lowend runs at 198MHz in 64K of RAM, but that is certainly an improvement on DOS6.2 on a 486 with 4K of RAM.

Don't you just love what Slackware Linux can do?!

Yes, I do love it. My other two machines that are ready to boot are a compaq 1200 with Pentium S 150MHz (144MB RAM) and a real PI 100MHz with 64MB RAM(I have run this one with only 16MB RAM + 16MB swap for testing). I also have an old blueberry iMac 350MHz with 128MB RAM which really flies with a Slackintosh(11.0) install using custom 2.4 kernel.

I use a KVM to switch between boxes in order to save space on my desk, though I really prefer to have each machine all set up with its' own hardware. Running a box headless leaves me in the dark if something goes wrong.

BTW, my primary machine is a PIII 700MHz with 512MB RAM -I've only had it about a year. Even though it would probably work okay with KDE or GNOME, I continue to use my own desktop environment which uses wdm as display manager, wmaker with ROX-Filer and taskbar-1.2 and only GTK-1.2 programs -no python, GNOME or KDE. I do occassionally run later firefox(GTK2) when I need good java or flash9 support.

A computer is a terrible thing to waste...