12.17.9. External Mouse
For better handling, e.g. with a 3 button mouse you may use an external mouse. This is usually a serial mouse or a PS/2 mouse, or in our days a USB mouse, appropriate to the port your laptop offers. Usually this is no problem. The only thing I currently don't know a solution for is the automagic detection of a newly plugged in mouse from X11. To get it work you have to restart your X server.
12.17.9.1. PS/2 Mouse
For PS/2 ports there are so called Y-Cable available, which make it possible to use external mouse and external keyboard at the same time if your laptop supports this feature.
Don't plug in the external mouse while powered up. If you have separate mouse and keyboard ports, make sure you plug the mouse in the mouse port and the keyboard in the keyboard port. If you don't, you may have to do a hard reboot of the laptop to get it to recover.
12.17.9.2. Wheel Mouse
Imwheel makes the wheel of your Intellimouse (and other wheel and stick mice) work in Linux/X11 to scroll windows up and down, or send keys to programs. It runs in the background as a daemon and requires little reconfiguration of the XWindows setup. 4 or more button mice and Alps Glidepad 'Taps' may also be used. imwheel includes a modified gpm for an alternate method of wheel input.
See also the WHEEL Mouse FAQ which describes how to get lots of X applications to recognise the scrolling action. For current instructions on XFree86 4.x see XFree86 4.x - Mouse Docs .
12.17.9.3. USB Mouse
This part is taken from The Linux USB Sub-System by Brad Hards.
12.17.9.3.1. USB Human Interface Device (HID) Configuration
12.17.9.3.1.1. General HID Configuration
There are two options for using a USB mouse or a USB keyboard - the standalone Boot Protocol way and the full featured HID driver way. The Boot Protocol way is generally inferior, and this document describes the full featured way. The Boot Protocol way may be appropriate for embedded systems and other systems with resource constraints and no real need for the full keyboard and mouse capabilities.
It is important to remember that the HID driver handles those devices (or actually those interfaces on each device) that claim to comply with the Human Interface Device (HID) specification. However the HID specification doesn't say anything about what the HID driver should do with information received from a HID device, or where the information that is sent to a device comes from, since this is obviously dependent on what the device is supposed to be doing, and what the operating system is. Linux (at the operating system kernel level) supports four interfaces to a HID device - keyboard, mouse, joystick and a generic interface, known as the event interface.
12.17.9.3.1.2. HID Mouse Configuration
In the kernel configuration stage, you need to turn on USB Human Interface Device (HID) support and Mouse Support Do not turn on USB HIDBP Mouse support. Perform the normal kernel rebuild and installation steps. If you are installing as modules, you need to load the input.o , hid.o and mousedev.o modules.
Plug in a USB mouse and check that your mouse has been correctly sensed by the kernel. If you don't have a kernel message, look for the changes to /proc/bus/usb/devices .
Since USB supports multiple identical devices, you can have multiple mice plugged in. You can get each mouse seperately, or you can get them all mixed together. You almost always want the mixed version, and that is what will be used together. You need to set up a device node entry for the mixed mice. It is customary to create the entries for this device in
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