Diagnosing mouse in text mode was Gnome file window keeps popping up

Allan Adler

Hi; Firstly - to address an earlier Gnome logout issue; You should always be able to use (some form of) the keyboard's TAB, SPACEBAR, Alt, Shift, ENTER , Up-Down Arrows keys to jump around to any GUI widgets (highlight to select, then ENTER, or SPACEBAR (usually to place-remove a tick mark in a checkbox)).

The easiest fastest way to diagnose ANY (possible) hardware issue is to replace the device with a known good one, This should be (many times) the first thing one does when having trouble with a device. I preach better than I listen to my own words sometimes though ;-) I recently struggled with a broken keyboard -- but refused to admit the issue was a hardware one, and racked my brains for a few days till I got fed up enough to try a replacement.

These articles may help (specifically 'gpm' related stuff)...

Have a look around and perform searches - since the archive goes backl in time quite a ways, and may yield info specific to your older RH 7.1 distribution.

For ex; This was written ~ 1997 =============

My Mouse Won't Work

Q. My new system came with a new Microsoft Mouse. This mouse doesn't work with Linux. After a couple of days of messing around, I've come to the conclusion that there is a problem with my model of the Microsoft Mouse--on the underside of the mouse is the designation Serial Mouse 2.1A. I have concluded that the problem lies with this mouse because the new system works perfectly well with my old Microsoft Mouse. Is something wrong with the new mouse?

A. I don't have access to the newest mouse, so Francois Chastrette has helped a lot with this problem. We are working on a satisfactory solution to include in gpm 1.12 right now (end of August). By the time you read this Linux Journal, the new version of the mouse server should be available by FTP. X support might take a bit longer as the X team has a huge package to manage. In the meantime, you can use the -R option of gpm to feed clean mouse packets to the X server.

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Follow up with;

I used the keywords "mouse redhat" to locate these articles, via the search function on their pages.

I'm running a 2.6.8-3-686 kernel on Debian, and recently did 2 full dist-upgrades all the way from Sarge to Sid -- well Sid broke my X, and installed Xorg and Udev, which really messed up my keyboard and mouse, so much so, that X would NOT start at all. The answer (partly) for me was to uninstall "Udev" and reinstall "Hotplug". I could have spent mucho time reconfiguring and trying to figure how Udev works, but it was too much for me to worry about it on a non-working dual boot system. I just needed X to start working again...

Point is... Better start learning how the kernel modules work, how they're compiled (and-or loaded), what hotplug, udev, devfs, etc are and how they relate to *your* installed kernel (I'd suspect perhaps 2.2?), and what changes (big) will occur if and when you upgrade.

Regards