Bugzilla – Bug 141345
GPM support in console sessions
Last modified: 2006-01-09 23:37:28 UTC
It would be really nice to have GPM support by default in console runlevels, so that you have mouse support in midnight commander for example. Using "gpm -m /dev/input/mice -t ps2" works just fine.
Not all mices are ps2
Select your mouse type in yast -> Hardware -> Mouse Model configure gpm to start automatically in yast -> System -> System Services (Runlevel) Unfortunately, yast doesn't do that automatically during installation. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 114919 ***
I get this when I want to start GPM by the services manager: Neither the variables MOUSEDEVICE and MOUSETYPE nor the variable GPM_PARAM is set in /etc/sysconfig/mouse My mouse type is set to "ImExPS/2 Logitech Explorer Mouse"
I just saw in the attached bug that I have to run YaST2 to update the settings. IMO this is not appropriate since all the system settings should be there after installation. Also SaX2 overwrites my hand-written xorg.conf every time I run it (since the binary ATI drivers can´t be configured with SAX).
Well, you can set MOUSEDEVICE="/dev/input/mice" ... MOUSETYPE="ps2" in /etc/sysconfig/mouse, if you don't want to do it via yast.
Thanks :) But I´m looking for bugs in SuSE to make it better, I know how to create thouse entries, I´m just thinking of "the average user". Shouldn´t the configuration be complete after setup?
The yast guys probably assumed that an average user will stick to X11, where the mouse is either detected (by X + kernel), or it's not and yast can't do anything about it. The problem with gpm is that it can behave quite funny if you don't get the mouse type/device right, so I can't just hardcode "-m /dev/input/mice -t ps2" in the init script -- it needs to be configured before it's run. But since most users probably won't need gpm at all, they shouldn't be bothered by another configuration dialog during the installation. The mouse dialog shout still appear in a text-mode installation though (can't check it ATM). Maybe I could change the error message in the init script to be easier to understand (eg. "run 'yast2 mouse' as root to configure console mouse" or something like that), do you think that would help a bit?
When SuSE is installed SAX2 (which is also "YAST2 mouse") runs automatically and detects a configuration for both mouse, graphics card display which is then displayed on the "hardware summary" page at the end of the installation (and then written to xorg.conf). So why doesn´t SAX2 set it then? It´s not really a big thing IMHO since not many user use GPM, but if it could be done in an easy way why not.