Make USB mouse to work on Red Hat 9
 

Hello people,
I've come across to very strange problem...
I need to replace PS2 three button ball mouse with newer optical USB mouse with wheel. I have disconected old mouse, place USB connector of the new mouse in the USB port and when I restarted computer, During starting procedure, Kudzu Hardware discovery tool window popped up and it found that "Generic PS2 wheel mouse" is disconnected and offer me to Keep existing configuration, remove the mouse or do nothing. I have removed that option and when computer started new mouse didn't work.
i restarted computer agian, but again no luck, this time no Kudzu opened, while I expected that hwd tool to open and to say something like "New hardwer is plugged in, do you like to configure and similar"
Note hat this is not a regular home PC, but it is in one company, and there is some kind of special sofware for production on it.
Also, there is a bios password, I thought that maybe USBs are disabled, but cannot check that.

Do you have any suggestions?

I don't remember exactly how old RH9 is, but I do know it hasn't been supported (inc security updates !!) for a few yrs.
It's possible it just doesn't understand USB mice?
Try connecting one, then reboot and check /var/log/dmesg and /var/log/messages.
If you can possibly upgrade to a recent distro it'd be much safer and it would also understand modern HW.

I have tried with redhat-config-mouse, but no success. It is possible that USB ports are disabled in bios and I cannot check that because there is a password in the bios.
Unfortunately, it's not possible to ugrade to newer distro, because, there is other software for industrial purpose. I can only access settings in terminal window.

I have made it work by using USB/PS2 adapter, so I plugged in new mouse. Now, new mouse is much faster and more sensitive and it is very hard to work with it.
Is there any way how to change mouse pointer speed under terminal window, that will reflect to graphical enviroment?

Thanks

Is there are particular reason why you are using RH9? As chrism suggested, support for RH9 was discontinued in 2004.

I strongly recommend that you upgrade to a recent, supported version of Linux, such as Fedora 7 (successor to Red Hat Linux), or Ubuntu 7.04. Any recent distro will have much better hardware support than such an old distro like RH9.

--Ian

Hello Ian,
Like I said, it is a business computer, on which a special industrial plant software is installed. I cannot remove RH9 because I cannot install that software again. I can only make changes on system by login as root user in terminal mode...

shouldn't a business computer be running something like Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 or 5, you should tell your business to consider upgrading to at least RHEL 4

I wonder if it is a mission critical system. Being run on a legacy OS that is 4 years out of date, unsupported, unpatched and riddled with security vulnerabilities.

--Ian

I think redhat-config-mouse is the command line program to set the mouse parameters. You could try man redhat-config-mouse and see what it all does. You could probably fix the speed, and jumpiness you're experiencing now. Micik, Are you a girl, or woman? I'm a guy, just so you everyone knows.