I recently bought a Trust PS/2 mouse. It does not work well. Often clicks are not sensed and scrolling with the wheel sometimes does not work and sometimes, after scrolling, the screen scrolls back a few lines.

I am running Debian Linux (KDE 2.5) on a dual core Athlon 2700.

The scrolling problem is much worse on a Windows 2000 PC.

Trust told me that the mouse is incompatible with Linux and seem to be skating around the Windows issue.

Is it possible that a PS/2 mouse could be incompatible with Linux? I would have thought that PS/2 is PS/2 and that's the end of the matter.

Hi.

Try running 'xev' and scroll, click etc. within the box provided. If the mouse is providing events you'll see them scroll by on the terminal window. If not, your mouse or your PS/2 port is dodgy.

Dave

To me it just sounds like the mouse you bought is defective.

To me it sounds like your mouse is defective.

Agreed. If it's not working correctly on 2 different computers the it's the mouse at fault. Take/send it back and ask for a replacement.
Ah, and when you take/send it back, don't mention Linux as it always makes prople wriggle and play the "not supported" card!

Thanks. As far as I'm concerned it is a defective mouse but Trust's twice repeated statement that it is not Linux compatible seems strange to me.

I think it may be a standard statement for any complaint. I'm not too impressed with this company. I bought a 2.1 speaker set at the same time and the power LED has stopped working. I wonder if the LED is incompatible with Linux

I too agree that the mouse is defective. Actually I have a mouse that this exact problem. Let me explain. I bought 2 identical mice made by Genius (a crappy company, don't buy form them, I won't anymore). One I gave to my brother and one was for me. I used mine for about 1 year before this problem appeared. It only happened when scrolling down. I checked with xev and indeed every 10-20 scrolls the mouse would somehow send signals for scrolling up rather than down. Having 2 identical mice I asked my brother if he had any such problems, he did not. I then switched mice with him, and found that his mouse did not have this problem, while my mouse still had the problem on his computer. This rules out bad ports and puts the full blame on the mouse being defective. Probably you do not have the resources do perform such an experiment, but I think it may be a common problem, and is most likely a defective mouse.

Very few things are incompatible with Linux, and their incompatibility is not manifested in such a way, it's usually an all-or-nothing thing, not the kind of defective behavior you are experiencing. For example on the Genius mice that I bought the side buttons do not work at all. This is because no drivers available on Linux will handle the odd way in which they work with these buttons. But it's that the buttons don't work at all, rather than the buttons working but acting strangely.

It's not the cost of the mouse, that's trivial. However it's the hassle of going out to buy another one and the determination not to let a company try to pull the wool over my eyes.

I have no doubt that the shop I bought the mouse from will replace it without a murmur. However I have now lost all faith in Trust. Not so much for the fact that 2 items failed as for their response to my email.

I ran Xev last night and saw the events being reported. However I did not examine the output and will certainly do so to se if the mouse is sending some incorrect signals.