Mouse not working in X on Slack 10.2
 

I'll try to be as detailed as possible...

I am running Slackware 10.2 on a Pentium 3 866@910MHz. My kernel version is 2.6.17 and everything worked just fine after upgrading the kernel. Recently, possibly due to a friend messing around with the machine, my mouse no longer tracks in X. I can tell that the mice I have tried are working, as they light up with all teh pretty lights that USB mice have. The mouse that is attached to the machine is a Logitech Trackman Wheel USB. I have attempted rebooting with and without the mouse plugged in to no avail. As far as I can tell - and yes, I'm still a n00b - everything is properly configured on the machine to use this particular mouse.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Summary:

Slack 10.2 Kernel 2.6.17
P3 866@910MHz
Logitech Trackman Wheel
Mouse not moving in X

perhaps the usb connectivity isn't working?

what happens when you unplug the usb cord and then re-insert it? Do you see some(slight) disk activity? Immediately doing `ls -ltr ` in /var/log, do you see something written to a file (messages / syslog / debug )?

USB Connectivity is there... dmesg | grep usb returns a new line each time I plug in or unplug the mouse, so I know the machine is seeing it, just not using it. Nothing going on in /var/log though...

I had to undo this after I compiled a 2.6 kernel, but out of the box, I had to uncomment a couple lines in rc.modules before my mouse would work properly on Slack 10.2.. I have an M$ usb-optical mouse though.

these are the two lines, they're the first 2 in the USB section...

/sbin/modprobe hid
/sbin/modprobe usbmouse (in retrospect, I think just 'hid' got it working)

I'm sure that's not the most elegant solution, but it got my mouse working, and there are many other modules in there you could try uncommenting that might be more appropriate to your hardware. Once I compiled a new kernel though, this was no longer necessary.. I'm certainly too much noob to say this with any authority, but perhaps you should compile another kernel and go over the input devices(or whatever it's called) section thoroughly

Try checking xorg.conf in the core pointer input device section. Google a bit for proper tutorials on how to have it properly configured. Sounds like you might have the wrong driver loaded. Does the mouse work properly through gpm?

zytsef, no it didn't work at all with 2.6.17 loaded, and I compiled the kernel with no modules because I just like having a small kernel... I guess I really just didn't use it after I upgraded the kernel, so it likely stopped the mouse working as soon as I started booting with the 2.6 build.

As a temporary fix, until I have time to go through the whole kernel again, I just rebooted and loaded up 2.4.31, started X and everything works fine... Thanks for the suggestions and help... I'm sure I just configured something ass backwards...

if you saved the config file from your compile, you shouldn't have to go through the whole kernel again. just copy the file to /usr/src/linux-2.6.17.x/.config and run "make oldconfig". then all the options should be setup as last configured them.