Mouse exhibits erratic behavior

[bigbrother]

I have a Logitech cordless optical mouse. I used to be running RedHat 7.3, under which this mouse worked fine. After installing gentoo, the mouse has very erratic behavior in both the console (gpm) and X windows.

The symtoms are that while moving the mouse, it starts to jump to places on the screen and seems to be emitting strange byte sequences (at least gpm and X are interpreting them in a strange way). For example, if gpm is running, moving the mouse will often cause non-printable characters to show up in the console. More often than not, if I keep moving the mouse around, the console locks up so that keyboard input does nothing. Not even Alt+SysRq+B works when that happens.

Anyway, I've tried all the different protocols that this mouse might be using (PS/2, IMPS/2, MMAN) and those don't seem to do anything.

If I recall correctly, it was running perfectly under RedHat with gpm -t ps2 and IMPS/2 as the protocol under X. Neither of those works correctly.

Also, if gpm is running, I get a lot of
[gpm] Skipping a data packet (?)
messages written to the system log.

I have kernel support for PS/2 mice compiled in and I do not use a KVM switch.

Does anyone know what's wrong?

Thanks.

[sulu]

Hi bigbrother.

[bigbrother]

I looked at devfsd.conf and there is no protocol information there -- only device selection, which is correct for me.

Tonight I did an experiment and it seems that the issue is related to devfs. The mouse is completely usable on a system without devfs enabled.

What I am going to try next is to enable all the USB mouse stuff in the kernel and then plug my mouse in to the USB port rather than with the USB->PS/2 adapter.

[sulu]

Hmmmm

That would indicate a false mapping of the mouse-device in devfs and so a wrong device driver comes into play.

[bigbrother]

I reinstalled and, oddly enough, it works fine now.

[NorthGoingZax]