oh yeah: no, I didn't change fstab. haven't in quite a while. The only chages I made were the upgrades to Slackware-current, and then more recently, fixing the problems in /etc/rc.d (described above)

In other words, you finally did what everyone told you to do to fix it. JK

Are your modules loading? I had this problem once after upgrading. What happens when you run 'modprobe psmouse'? Also, check the rc.gpm.

regards,
...drkstr

sorry for the long reply... been away.

drkstr: yeah that was all it was. psmouse was getting blacklisted in the file /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist and psmouse wasn't being loaded in /etc/rc.d/rc.modules
...easily fixed.
Now there seems to be something wrong with the ALSA. It's hard to say exactly what...
When I logged in to KDE up, the CPU was held at 100% and then after a couple of minutes, I got an error that ALSA had overloaded the CPU (or something like that) and was aborting. I set KDE to not use any Audio device, and that fixed the login problem, but maybe not in the best way.
I noticed in the blacklist file that ac97, ac97_codec, and via82cxxx_audio are blacklisted. I think I used to use one of these for sound. Why would they now be blacklisted and what's the alternative to them that works?
Interestingly, I can still get sound from some programs... Xine plays mp3's fine. But other apps, like Konsole in KDE freeze for a while when they try to play a system bell noise.

Assuming you are using the latest modutils and 2.6.x<17 kernel, add something like this to /etc/modprobe.d/sound

and either reboot or run

rmmod snd-via82xx
modprobe snd-via82xx

Alternatively, upgrade your ALSA/Kernel (this bug is fixed in 1.0.12, and Pat has the patch here against 1.0.11)


... and read the Changelog, Pat stumbled on this same bug a few months ago.

in reference to '/dev' problem, if it can help, Pat in the new file CHANGES_AND_HINTS.TXT (root of Slackware current repository) writes:
...
* a/devs was upgraded during the -current development cycle. You
CANNOT upgrade this package while udev is running - you'll need to
chmod -x /etc/rc.d/rc.udev, reboot, upgrade the devs package, and then
reboot again. Actually, you don't *have* to reboot again, but if you
know that, then you likely know how to go about it that way
If you don't know the trick, here's how to do it (no secrets here):
sh /etc/rc.d/rc.udev stop
umount /dev/pts
umount /dev/shm
umount -l /dev
installpkg devs*.tgz
sh /etc/rc.d/rc.udev start
mount -av
Thanks to Richard Hoyle for this information.
...

bye

Henryx