Here's the thing; I come from dos-land,c,c++, and
assembly language. I just wrote a c program using int86
to do software interrupts to read the mouse status.
This doesn't seem to be straightforward in linux.
This because of: ncurses,script languages,etc. which
to me seem vague; that is, does,say, ubuntu linux have
mouse reading functions 'built in' that can be accessed from the plain old bash console? I see references to
structs, etc., but *I can't even figure out what they are referencing!*
I'm really asking can I just access a standard int
routine like in dos? Thank you. skyte.

If you mean something like DOS' int 21h, then it's int 80h in Linux.
If you mean direct IRQ handling etc. from user program, then no, you can't. DOS is an unprotected OS where you do what you want with the hardware and memory. Linux, as any modern OS, has several levels of security, one of which is restricting user mode programs from *direct* hardware access. You can though go into kernel mode by writing a driver and do what you need including servicing IRQs, accessing I/O ports etc.
Most devices in Linux are represented by their corresponding device files. These are usually located in /dev directory.
The files which correspond to mice and keyboards usually are in /dev/input directory.