I just moved my ps2 intellimouse (scroll mouse) from my tower to my Slack laptop-I did have a ps2 3 button mouse. Sometimes it behaves ok and sometimes (in GUI) menu's pop up for no reason and all I can do to get back to the console is CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE. The mouse is detected in console but it won't select/copy text.

When my pc boot, I see the following error

modprobe: can't locate module psmouse

When I run setup in pkgtool for mouse I chose ps2 mouse again (ps2 intellimouse messes up my system even more than it is.

Is there another way of specifying the console mouse?

Can you post the mouse section of your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file?

Do you mean how to choose the mouse protocol on text mode (using gpm) or X? Both have different configurations.

In case of gpm (text mode) you could run: gpm -t help | less
That will list all support protocols and then you can edit the correspnding line in /etc/rc.d/rc.gpm (I think that's what pkgtool does).

To configure X, you've to edit the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file as datadriven said and choose the protocol there. You can find about different protocols here: http://www.x.org/X11R6.8.2/doc/mouse.html
Most configurations will work with IMPS/2 or ExplorerPS/2 protocols.

It's known that sometimes gpm can conflict in X, so you could try stopping it with: /etc/rc.d/rc.gpm stop
And try to see if X behaves correctly.

Regarding the psmouse module, I don't have the original kernel in my machines, but maybe it's compiled directly into the kernel and not as module.

I think gpm is conflicting with X since X works (and scrolls) in X at times but never in the console. I'll try stopping gpm. Thanx!