Hello everyone,
I installed slackware 13.1 lately to a laptop. its a toshiba satellite m40 185 if it makes any difference.
In any case, and while the touchpad works flawlessly, connecting a standard USB mouse to the pc does not power up the mouse (its a microsoft notebook optical mouse) and of course the mouse pointer does not follow the mouse's moves... no clicks either.
basically when I do , I don't see junk printed on my terminal, whereas moving around the touchpad I do see some.

Just to clarify, It's not just X that is not working, gpm doesn't get mouse moves from the usb mouse either (touchscreen works flawlessly in console too).

my xorg.conf looks like:
I added the last 2 options after following this guide, which seems to cover concurrent read-in from more than 1 pointing devices.

All the other guides I found assume that you have a working gpm.

One question is: since with the new radeon drivers the xorg.conf file can be missing altogether and X will not cry, does it make any difference to add mouse options in xorg.conf?

Continuing my thought: it must be something else. Kernel doesn't seem to be the problem. The USB subsystem works since usb mass storage devices (that's all I have sitting around) are sensed by the kernel and udev properly. Additionally, the problem persists with the huge kernel.

Before slackware, I used to run fedora on the laptop and both pointing devices worked properly, however I think fedora uses another method of setting up the X server devices..

Any help or pointers as to which way to look would be greatly appreciated!
Thank you!

Does the system detect the USB mouse when it is plugged in? The lsusb command (maybe with the -v option) would show. There should be something in /var/log/messages too.

1 members found this post helpful.

nope, lsusb looks empty (i am not quoting -v to avoid a huge msg):

also dmesg and /var/log/messages seem 'dead' (before and after plug and unplug nothing is logged).

finally udevadm monitor seems dead too.

it seems as if the usb subsystem is completely dead.. (but then again usb mass storages are mounted properly).
the mouse is alive too when i connect it to another pc..

Could you try now:

If other USB mice work on your computer;
If the usbhid module is loaded (/sbin/lsmod).

1 members found this post helpful.

found it after all.
i had not included the module uhci_hcd in my custom kernel.
it is an essential module if you have an intel chipset.

all running fine now!

thank you all for your help!