My mouse stopped working after a power outage. I've tested it with live cds and it still works fine. But on my system all /dev references to either ps2 and usb mice say 'no such device'. I made a post about this in the Hardware section and this question came up:

Does Debian have a package that can be installed that will create the appropriate nodes?

Here is a link to the original thread:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...=1#post2445290

I've been attacking this problem for days with nothing to show for it but dead ends. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Could you post the section on mice from your Xorg config please? Are they (I understand you have several) USB, PS/2 or serial? In case of an USB mouse, are the required usb modules loaded and properly linked? Could you compare the mouse sections on Debian and one of the successful live-cd's?

I just tried Puppy livecd again, and both mice were actually working simultaneously

here is the /proc/bus/input/devices file from debian and puppy and
the xorg.conf file, renamed with _puppy. I also find it odd that my gamepad is missing from the debian one, but I'll deal with that later.

http://68.50.48.51/

I remember checking for the usb module. Plus when I plug it in I get this line

usb 1-2: new low speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 5
input: Microsoft Microsoft 5-Button Mouse with IntelliEye(TM) on usb-0000:00:1f.2-2

Which leads me to believe that the module is working.
But maybe it's not linked. How do I check that and fix it? Because it seems likely that they're just not linked properly since the system knows they're there but X11 doesn't. Why a power outage would break that is beyond me, but that might be it.

Also, thanks for your interest. Since this doesn't seem to be a very popular thread

check to see if the proper modules are loaded for a USB mouse..

lsmod - then look for the following moduules
hid
input
mousedev

http://www.linux-usb.org/USB-guide/x194.html

That was it. A quick run through modconf showed the mouse modules blatantly missing. Right after I added them X -configure stated it found a mouse and startx plopped fluxbox down post haste with 2 working mice.

Thanks a million.

But now for the million dollar question. How on earth were those modules removed from the kernel without my knowledge???? Could the powerfailure really be to blame? Or is it possible some sort of overhaul in the last apt update removed the modules?

Read the comments in /etc/modules.conf for the answer to that.

You would probably be better off putting your manual customizations in /etc/modules to prevent that from possibly happenning in the future. This would cause the module to be loaded at startup.

Really what seems strange to me is that you have to even do manually editing at all. Usually Debian is pretty good about loading modules as the need arises. I would check into how your kernel is configured.

Back with kernel 2.4 I once had to add a couple of lines to /etc/modutils/sound to get the system to load my alsa drivers properly when the sound card was being accessed (totally different story with 2.6 kernel of course.). All I had to do was run update-modules, just one time, after making that change and it would handle the loading and unloading of my alsa-based sound card drivers in a nice automagic way from that point on.

I'm still not quite sure how all of that applies to kernel 2.6, if it even does any more. The man pages were a bit confusing in that regard. Do a man update-modules to see what I'm getting at.