Serial mouse NOT working

gerul · n00b Joined: 24 Sep 2005 Posts: 8 Location: Rzeszow Poland

Hello,
After lost 3 days of my life trying to force my serial mouse working, I've decided to write here looking for help.
Don't ask why serial, don't ask why Pentium 133 machine (!!!), it's just my point to get this junk working. It was working for years before, but few days ago I've decided to reinstall gentoo from scratch.
I've checked the hardware, it's 100% working. When I launch gentoo live install cd, this mouse is working, as does with MS-DOS mouse driver.
When I boot into gentoo installed on hdd, it's not working.

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Sat Oct 13, 2012 9:46 am Post subject:

gerul,

Welcome to Gentoo.

Its been a long time since I've used a serial mouse and even longer sinve I used a serial mount on a system where the PCI bus was a new invention.
Your kernel looks OK.

Notice from your lspci output that the serial ports are not listed. This means that they are on the ISA bus in your system.
Making ISA work in Linux is a learning experience in itself.

The blindfold approach is to go into your BIOS, tell it you have a Plug'n'Play and not to reserve any IO addresses, DMAs or IRQ for the ISA bus in the belief that Linux will detect everything. It might actually work for serial ports that have always used the same resources since the IBM PC was invented. It might not too.
There is a reason why ISA Plug'n'Play was called Plug'n'Pray.

If that fails, it gets harder. Allocate resources (DMA, IRQs, IO Ports) for the serial ports in the BIOS. Build the kernel serial port driver as a module, then pass the module the IRQ, Ports and DMA as module parameters at module load time. Plyg'n'Play, when it works does this for you. The linux Plug-and-Play-HOWTO is worth reading. WARNING: That document is 5 years old. Some of the file names in /etc have changed.

For testing - before you even connect the mouse, to ensure the serial port is working and it won't until the kernel and hardware are trying to use the same resources, connect pins 2 and 3 together on the PC serial port, Thats Tx data and Rx data and use minicom. When it works, anything you type in minicom will be echoed back via the serial port.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

tomtom69 · Posted: Sun Oct 14, 2012 6:08 pm Post subject:

Hi,

I would first try to look whether serial ports are working.
What ouput gives:
cat /proc/ioports
cat /proc/tty/driver/serial
?

tom

gerul · n00b Joined: 24 Sep 2005 Posts: 8 Location: Rzeszow Poland

cat /proc/ioports:

tomtom69 · Posted: Mon Oct 15, 2012 4:04 pm Post subject:

So your serial port seems OK, but X does not find a mouse.
Try to add this to your /etc/X11/xorg.conf:

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Mouse0"
Driver "mouse"
Option "CorePointer"
Option "Device" "/dev/ttyS0"
Option "Protocol" "serial"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
EndSection

(if you do not have an /etc/X11/xorg.conf then create one and only paste the section)
I also assume that your mouse does not work on X. Did you try to emerge and start "gpm" to get console support for mouse?

gerul · n00b Joined: 24 Sep 2005 Posts: 8 Location: Rzeszow Poland

I didn't reach the point of getting mouse support in X. cat /dev/ttyS0 returns nothing. It suppose to return garbage characters displayed when moving mouse. I have gpm but it doesn't work either. The point is, on the same hardware config, when launched basic system from liveCD, it works...
_________________
GERUL
General Electronic Repair and Utility Lifeform

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Mon Oct 15, 2012 6:29 pm Post subject:

gerul,

Please test with minicom and the wire link between pins 2 and 3 in the serial port connector.
Its pins 2 and 3 regardless of it being a 9 pin or 25 pin connector.

You have to set up the start bits, data bits, stop bits, parity and baud rate to get a serial link to work.
minicom makes this easy and it will confirm your kernel is indeed correct.

For a mouse, you probably want 8n1, 9600. Thats 8 data bits, no parity, 1 start bit and 9600 baud.
Faster than 9600 and you will get dropped characters during disk IO unless your UARTs provide a buffer.
Be sure to turn off all handshaking in minicom. Mice don't use it.

So, set up minicom to work on /dev/ttyS0 at 8n1, 9600 and make sure it can talk to itself via the wire link.
Take the wire link off then try the mouse.

Getting characters from the mouse is one thing, getting the right characters is another.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

eccerr0r · Posted: Mon Oct 15, 2012 6:53 pm Post subject:

I just had to check whether there was any Linux regression...

So on my Gigabyte EP43-UD3L there is a serial port header... I hooked up a DB9 to that and hooked it to one of my AVR experiments that uses a serial port... and it works...

So at least 3.3.8 (x86) still works, apparently...

So...
1. When you cat /proc/tty/driver/serial and you move the mouse/click the buttons, do you get tx and rx bytes increasing?
2. If you cat /proc/interrupts, do you see the interrupt count increasing when you move the mouse/click buttons for irq4?

You may need to cat /dev/ttyS0 at the same time to open the port.

Usually when I see a port stop working it's due to a conflict, either driver or IRQ. One thing to try is to disable the "share IRQ" option and see if there are any other drivers trying to take up IRQ4 because though software may be able to share, older hardware cannot share. The software may be programming PnP to share but they really can't...
_________________
Intel Core i7 2700K/Radeon R7 250/24GB DDR3/256GB SSD
What am I supposed watching?

gerul · n00b Joined: 24 Sep 2005 Posts: 8 Location: Rzeszow Poland

I'm even more confused now. I have no idea how to tinker with this minicom thing. I tried to setup serial port, I did it. Then when I launched it, i saw a line of dots when I moved mouse. Any key didn't work however, so I had to kill the process from another terminal. After that... the mouse started working! cat /dev/ttyS0 started to show characters as I moved mouse. Of course after restart, it's f*cked again.
I tried to connect pins 2-3 but... didn't know what to do next, none of the keys were working...

UPDATE:
Every time when I launch minicom, the mouse starts working. Until next restart.
_________________
GERUL
General Electronic Repair and Utility Lifeform

tomtom69 · Posted: Tue Oct 16, 2012 6:08 pm Post subject:

Really strange. It looks like if minicom changes some setting for the serial port which is needed to support the mouse.
Try to read the serial settings using
stty -F /dev/ttyS0 -a

Is there any difference regarding the stty output before and after running minicom?

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Tue Oct 16, 2012 7:05 pm Post subject:

gerul,

I suspect that mincom is setting the serial port to 8n1, 9600 which is probably what the mouse wants.
If you poke about in the help, minicom will show you what it set the port to - it will not read it back.

Now we know that the mouse works after minicom, you have proven the kernel and everything else, so there is no need for the link on pins 2and 3 and further testing with minicom.

It should just be a case of calling setserial, with the right parameters, probably in a .start file in /etc/local.d/
As it works on the liveCD, so how the liveCD does it and use that ... thats what OSS is all about, using the work of others.

The liveCD might have a file in its /etc/local.d/ you can copy ... I don't have an ISO handy, so I've not looked.

Welcome to the world of the RS232 standard. Thats the problem with standards, there are so many to choose from.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.