Just recently started getting into linux. I'm figuring out things fine except I can't seem to get any USB mouse to work on my laptop. I installed Knoppix 3.4 to my hard drive on my laptop (because I can only patch my Orinoco drivers easily under 2.4 kernel) which is Debian. My touchpad works fine, but of course touchpads are annoying after prolonged usage. I've tried looking around on Google and this forum and didn't really find anything..

My first problem was when I plugged in the mouse, nothing would happen at all (no power). I solved that by running "/etc/init.d/hotplug restart" and my mouse now powers.

Then I ran "dpkg-reconfigure -plow xserver-xfree86" and played with the mouse settings a bit, but nothing seemed to happen.

The USB mouse is a Microsoft Notebook Optical mouse. Any direction would be great.