PS/2 Mouse not working on RH 9.0
 

I am new to RH. I am running RH 9.0 on a Compaq Proliant 1600 with 2 P2 400 MHz processors and 384 MB ram. I have a generic Dell PS/2 2-button mouse w/o scroll or wheel or anything. On install of RH it does not recognize the mouse. I configure it for a generic PS/2 mouse with 3 button support, and once started the pointer just stays in the middle of the screen and doesn't move. I know that the mouse is fine because when I switch to the other PC (running windows 2000) on the KVM switch it works fine, as it did on the 1600 before installing Linux. I can't get to the command line because I have no mouse control at all, it doesn't even budge. The one time I did get the command line was when RH failed to boot properly and put me at the root prompt.I've tried other mouse drivers by using tab until I get to start here and getting to system settings, but I am limited to what other types of mice I can try because I can't even expand the tree under the different brands(i.e. Microsoft, Logitech). I am familiar with Unix, but not all that comfortable with Linux yet and so I don't know the keyboard commands to get around the desktop without the mouse. Any help would be greatly appreciated, since I have tried reinstalling everything three times now.

Problems with the mouse
 

I have the same problem. I tried installing on Proliant 1600 600Mhz and 450Mhz systems and ran into the same thing. No matter how I t ried to reset the mouse to something else, it would not work and stayed in the middle of the screen. I tried reinstalling several times, and even updated the bios on the sytem; but still no go. I finally went out and spend $20 on a cheap USB PCI card, and mouse and installed them. The Compaq Smartstart doesn't recognize the USB mouse. But that is not a big deal as you can manuver around Smart start with the keyboard. Once the Linux install started it recognized the USB mouse and away I went. Not a very large cost solution considering all of the pain I went through.

Mouse problems with older Proliants
 

In order to learn more about Linux I wanted to remove my USB card "easy solution" and do some further investigating. I found the solution below on a post on the hp.com forums about Suse Linux (sorry, I did not record the original author). I tried it on my Compaq Proliant 1600 (350Mhz, 256M mem, 2SL controller), and Compaq Proliant 1850R (600Mhz, 512M mem, 3200 controller) and it works installing Suse Linux Pro v9.0. There were no detailed explanations of each step and I offer it pretty much as is with an explination of a few items...

1. Perform a manual install:

a. Do not load anything with USB. I did not load "usb-storage, usbcore, usb-uhci".
b. unload all SCSI drivers and ensure that the cpqarray driver is loaded
(I left the internal SCSI driver in and it works fine).
c. load the network card.
d. change the GRUB bootloader setting to: nosmp noapic acpi=off ide=nodma
(I added these to the GRUB bootloader line in the config file)

2. Package Selections:

"(I managed to use a graphical interface)"
a. "- default with graphical interface"
b. "- Add KDE". I added KDE to my install packages.


3. Finish the Install and reboot from CD:

a. Select Resuce System.
b. login as root (no password)
c. type: mkdir /media/hd
d. type: mount /dev/ida/c0d0p2/media/hd
e. type: mv /media/hd/etc/hotplug /media/hd/etc/hotplug.crap

4. Reboot from harddrive and continue install.